Ethereum continues to rally: price soars to $1,700 mark

With no sign of a major dip in price, Ether has continued to rally and has now reached another ATH of $1,732, across all major crypto exchanges. In the last hour, Ethereum was up over 5.7% over the past 24 hours.

Source: ETH/USD, TradingView

After breaking its recent resistance at $1,500, the price of Ether breached a new all-time high over $1,690 on 4 February. After facing a minor correction, Ether had slipped to the $1,590 range. Experts are bullish on the asset and believe that as long as Ether maintains support at $1,640 and more, the asset could rally higher.  

However, the increase in prices of Ether has affected the network’s transaction fees. According to Bitinfocharts, average Ethereum network transaction fee was more than $20 for the first time in the network’s history.

Source: Bitinfocharts

Due to the spike in GAS fees, crypto exchange Liquid temporarily suspended withdrawal for Ether and certain ERC-20 tokens. Even fees associated with DeFi projects surged with the cost of simple Swaps on Uniswap and SushiSwap ranging from $40 to $75, respectively. 

Last year, some protocols tried to compete with Ethereum to offer customers an alternative to Ethereum’s traffic congestion and high cost of transactions. It will be interesting to watch whether the current market situation will make way for competitors to find new opportunities to market their coins again.

Synthetix founder Kain Warwick suspected that the transaction volume on the network will continue to rise as Ether climbs to new levels.