Investors Flooding into Altcoins as Ethereum and Others Explode Over the Last Seven Days

Jack Choros

Content Marketing
February 5, 2021

Altcoin season is officially here! As usual, the most valuable altcoin of all is leading the rest of the bunch to levels investors like you and I haven’t seen since the initial coin offering bonanza of 2017.

Just in the last seven days, Ethereum is up nearly 27% compared to a 12.5% gain for Bitcoin. At the time of this writing, the price of one Ethereum token now sits at $2,150 after reaching an all-time high of $2,238 Canadian just two hours ago.

Why the Ethereum Bull Run Is Happening Now

Let’s get this straight. At the present moment, all major altcoins are skyrocketing in value. But there is a specific and fundamental reason Ethereum is starting to catch up to Bitcoin. It all has to do with the fact that Ethereum is the gateway to decentralized finance.

If you’re an investor who wants to earn interest on your Ethereum tokens or lend those tokens to liquidity pools to earn even higher interest using other tokens, you have no choice but to be connected to the Ethereum blockchain for the most part.

You can see this happening if you look at statistics on a website like cryptofees.info. Notice that cryptocurrency users are routinely paying significantly higher volumes of fees to the Ethereum network as opposed to doing everything in Bitcoin. This means investors are still hungry for DeFi gains. If all you do is scroll down on the transaction data, you’ll see that every project highlighted in pink lives on the Ethereum blockchain.

That said, the fact that various DeFi projects and even Ethereum competitors like Polkadot are going crazy right now is not just because of transaction volume or fundamental value. It’s also because of the social media investing revolution. See Elon Musk and Dogecoin.

Elon Musk Sends Dogecoin to the Moon

Elon Musk is proving he understands the power of connecting with younger investors on social media. When GameStop stock began sending shockwaves throughout Wall Street just a week ago, it was Musk that took to Twitter to tweet “Gamestonks” (stonks is WallStreetBets slang for stocks).

When social media savvy youngsters on TikTok decided to try and see if they could send Dogecoin to a one dollar per coin valuation (a crypto that is nothing but a decentralized meme), it was Musk who was tweeting about it over and over again. While Dogecoin is nowhere near $1, it did go up 800% in value in a 24-hour time span thanks to GameStop and Musk.

The guy didn’t stop there. He even changed his Twitter bio to #Bitcoin for a few days.

GameStop Cools Off, Heating Up Crypto

If there is one thing the investing world is learning from GameStop, it’s that the ability of social media to spread information quickly across the Internet is the retail investor’s great equalizer. Governments won’t be able to regulate it effectively and hedge funds can’t compete against it.

Investors who are seeing GameStop stock plummet because of companies and governments blocking trading are now taking their GameStop profits over to the cryptocurrency world. Crypto is the only place where the ability to become wealthy is truly democratic.

That’s why the last seven days (and likely many seven-day periods to come) are going to see a lot of altcoins reaching new heights.

Altcoin believers have been saying for years that Ethereum is grossly undervalued. Now everything happening with regard to social media, Wall Street, hedge funds, the coronavirus pandemic and cryptocurrencies is showing the world that decentralized finance truly is the way of the future. 

If you’re looking to buy and sell ETH? It’s also why now is the time to register at Netcoins and get your hands on some Ethereum. Netcoins is Canada’s first fully regulated publicly traded crypto trading platform. Simply open an account with Netcoins, fund it with an e-Transfer (other funding options are available), and go to the trade page to purchase ETH. Sign up today!

 

Written by: Jack Choros

Writer, content marketing at Netcoins.