Ethereum (ETH) touched a fresh all-time high of $4,138.46 in the early hours of Monday as the surge in the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap continued unabated.
What Happened: The Vitalik Buterin co-created cryptocurrency traded 3.54% higher at $4,114.19 at press time.
In comparison, the apex cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC), traded 0.68% higher at $58,820.05 at press time.
On Monday, on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant’s CEO, Ki Young Ju, said that United States-based institutional investors were behind ETH’s parabolic move.
Ki pointed to what he called an “insane” Ethereum-Coinbase premium in a tweet.
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“Selling [ETH] now seems not a good idea in the long term. Follow US institutional investors, not against them,” said the analyst.
Earlier, he said that U.S. institutional investors are buying ETH using the exchange run by Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ:COIN).
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Why It Matters: LikeFolio co-founder Andy Swan said Sunday that there was a flow from Dogecoin (DOGE) to ETH, which he labeled “insane.”
DOGE fell by as much as 30% hours after Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk hosted “Saturday Night Live” even though he mentioned the meme coin several times during his appearance. At press time, DOGE traded 7.89% higher at $0.55.
Another boost for ETH has come thanks to the Decentralized Finance or DeFi arena. Mark Cuban called Ethereum a platform for smart contracts and said as long as it can executive on its “feature and performance enhancements” it will continue to expand the applications build for it.
Non-fungible Tokens or NFTs are another driver for Ethereum, which Buterin sees as holding more potential than simply becoming a “casino” for already-wealthy celebrities.
[Read: Why demand for cryptos is exploding – plus 8 cryptos you must avoid like the plague]