In brief
- Bitcoin and Ethereum are close to breaking new records.
- As the two flagship digital coins rise, altcoins like Solana and Dogecoin have posted larger daily gains.
- Ethereum is now up 29% on the week, outpacing all other major coins.
Dogecoin and Solana were soaring Wednesday just as Bitcoin edged towards a new all-time high.
Solana, the sixth-biggest coin by market cap, soared to a price of nearly $204 before dipping down to $198 Wednesday morning New York time. The asset is up by more than 9% over the past day, crypto data provider CoinGecko shows, and Wednesday's peak was the highest price seen for SOL since July 22.
Meanwhile, O.G. meme coin DOGE was recently trading for a little over $0.24 after jumping by nearly 8% over a 24-hour period. Over a seven-day period, the ninth biggest virtual coin by market cap has risen by over 20%.
But unlike Solana, which hit a new high of $293 in January, Dogecoin has gone years without hitting a fresh peak—and still has to climb 67% before it beats its 2021 all-time high.
The surge in major coins and tokens comes as Bitcoin, the biggest coin by market cap, made a brief jump above the $122,000 mark.
Bitcoin in July set a new high when it traded above $122,838. The leading cryptocurrency has risen modestly over the past day by about 1%, based on the current price of $121,237. But zooming out, Bitcoin has jumped by 6% over the last week.
Still, the flagship coin's gains pale in comparison to Ethereum's, which was also close to breaking a new record on Wednesday. The second biggest coin by market cap rose as high as $4,720 early Wednesday, just 3% off its 2021 record of $4,878.
Ethereum has surged 29% over the last week alone, pushing the coin higher amid a nearly 54% spike in the last 30 days.
ETH's price has been fueled by investors fast piling into Ethereum ETFs—which started trading last year—and publicly traded companies pivoting to a crypto treasury model and buying up billions of dollars' worth of the digital coin.
British bank Standard Chartered said in a research note Wednesday that ETH could reach as high as $25,000 by 2028.
Myriad users believe that ETH will skip past its all-time high mark and hit $5,000 for the first time by the end of 2025, giving that a nearly 87% chance as of this writing. (Disclaimer: Myriad Markets is a product of Decrypt's parent company, DASTAN.)