Ethereum surpassed $3,800 on Wednesday morning, hitting its highest level since late 2021.
At the time of the announcement, the price of Ethereum was slightly lower, trading at $3,796.53, up 2.8% on the day, according to data from CoinGecko. The cryptocurrency last traded above $3,800 on December 29, 2021, according to the price tracking site.
The surge in cryptocurrency prices has seen staked Ethereum hit more than $116 billion earlier this week, marking a 9% increase since the start of the year. Currently, there are 31,320,207 ETH staked, worth over $119 billion at ETH’s current price, according to data from beaconcha.in.
Ethereum’s positive momentum also comes amid expectations of the network’s Dencun upgrade, which is scheduled to be pushed to mainnet on March 13. Dencun will introduce Proto-danksharding to Ethereum, a measure designed to reduce transaction costs and address issues related to scalability in layer 2 blockchains.
Following full implementation, Dencun is expected to enable Ethereum to inexpensively process more than 100,000 transactions per second. According to Terence Tsao, a developer at Offchain Labs, which built Arbitrum, Dencun will lower gas fees on layer 2 networks by up to 75%, potentially allowing cryptocurrency companies to cover the gas costs of users on layer 2 networks.
Dencun also introduces “blobs” to temporarily compress transaction data off-chain to minimize storage and processing costs on Ethereum. “We will be able to process data in a much more efficient and cheaper way,” said Ethereum core developer Mario Havel. decryption last year.
Another feature set that will come with the Dencun upgrade is EIP-7044. EIP-7044 is an Ethereum improvement proposal that allows ETH validators and stakers to store instructions for when to close positions. This means that validators can automatically close positions when a node becomes inactive, thus avoiding being fined for failing to process transactions.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.