Crypto Scoop: Bitcoin and Ether transaction fees skyrocket as prices rise

Here’s a round-up of this week’s Crypto Scoop:

• Ether records new ATH of $1600
  
• Transaction fees for bitcoin and ether increase
  
• Visa to allow bank customers buy bitcoin 
  
• Elon Musk sparks 50% increase in Dogecoin

Ether climbs to $1,600 marking a new ATH

Setting a new record from last time, Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency started rallying to a new ATH on Tuesday when it hit $1,500. On Wednesday, it increased by over 6% to reach $1,634 but kept rising and peaked at $1695.20 in the early hours of Thursday, thus setting a new All-Time High.

ETH was not the only coin to set a new record, though, other major DeFi tokens such as chainlink (LINK), sushiwap (SUSHI) and aave (AAVE) as well as some rival coins; Polkadot (DOT) and solana (SOL) and Binance Coin (BNB) also reached new ATH.

Ether’s new record might be fueling more excitement in investors as they start to see value in these DeFi projects. One of these investors is 21Shares, an investment product provider in Switzerland who announced that they would be launching an exchange-traded product for Polkadot.

This news stirred up interest in more buyers who are staking more DOT on exchanges. The new price records may also be as a result of Grayscale reopening its Ethereum Trust. The company added almost 24,000 ether which was at the time of purchase worth over $37 million.

Bitcoin and Ether transaction fees skyrocket

On Tuesday, bitcoin rose to $38,000 but quickly dipped below $37,000 and has maintained a 24-hour range of $36k - $38k. Along with prices, transaction fees of both bitcoin and ether have increased significantly. Other than being the two top cryptocurrencies by market value, BTC and ETH also have the highest transaction fees.

The average transaction fee on the bitcoin network is around $14.25 while the average transaction fee for ether is $20.65, according to a report on Bitcoin.com. Although, the median costs of transactions are much lower - $8.58 for BTC and $9.35 for ETH - they are still significantly higher than they used to be.

These high fees might be what keeps pushing stablecoins like USDT and USDC from these networks to other blockchains.

Read Also: Stablecoin adoption rises as Bitcoin price fluctuates

Visa wants to help traditional banks provide crypto services

On Wednesday, Visa announced that it was launching an API with one of its partners, Anchorage, a federally chartered digital bank, that would allow traditional banks to offer Bitcoin through their existing services. Customers would be able to buy, sell and trade digital assets all held by Anchorage within their current customer experiences.

First Boulevard, a native neobank (an online-only bank) primarily serving the Black community is the first to test out Visa’s crypto API. Visa has been known to offer card issuing services to crypto companies and even partnered with over 30 of them but this is the first that the company has offered crypto services to banks.

The global payments giant said that the product will help its other clients add crypto features to their services later in the year and has issued a waitlist.

Elon Musk gives Dogecoin a boost on Twitter

“No highs, no lows, only Doge”

This was the tweet that saw Doge rise at a whopping 50% - around $0.059 per coin - early on Thursday. The Tesla founder had initially tweeted a single word: “Doge” before sharing a photoshopped picture of him in an iconic moment from the Lion King with Doge in Simba’s place.

Such influence affecting crypto price is not new and has happened on a number of occasions due to its relatively small market. For example, DOGE value had doubled after an adult actress by the name of Angela Whte had said she held the cryptocurrency. A similar incident occured in January when attention from a known Reddit trading group had caused DOGE to rise by 800%.