Ether continues its record run, tops $4,700 for first time

Momentum has been swinging higher since a Finder.com report in late October predicted ether’s price would top $5,100 by year’s end, based on a poll of fintech experts. The same report predicts ether to top $50,000 by 2030.

Furthermore, a number of crypto experts, including crypto hedge-fund manager Rahul Rai, believe ether is on pace to overtake bitcoin as the No. 1 cryptocurrency around the middle of 2022, an event dubbed “the flippening,” Business Insider reported last week.

However, as ether’s price surges, so are transaction fees — BitInfoCharts found the average transaction fee for ether was $41.53 as of Saturday, about three to four times what they were in August.

As of Sunday night, ether’s market cap was still about half of bitcoin’s: $554.5 billion for ether, to $1.226 trillion for bitcoin.

Bitcoin BTCUSD, +5.52%, meanwhile, rallied Sunday as well, last at $65,114, according to Coindesk data, shy of its all-time high of $66,923, set in October. Bitcoin is up about 20% over the past month, and has soared more than 125% year to date.

Ether is up 31% over the past month, and has skyrocketed a whopping 535% in 2021.