Ethereum surged by 28.9% from $1,939 to over $2,400 Friday morning, on the heels of the Pectra upgrade—which core developers called the “most ambitious upgrade” the network has ever implemented.
The second-largest cryptocurrency is currently trading at $2,339, up 20.4% on the day, per data from CoinGecko.
On Wednesday, Ethereum successfully rolled out its Pectra upgrade. This was the third significant upgrade since The Merge in 2022, in which the network moved from the proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake.
Pectra aims to improve the network’s user experience, scalability, and staking flexibility. This is being done by enabling account abstraction, tweaking data storage requirements, as well as increasing validator staking limits and allowing them more flexibility when withdrawing.
In the three months leading up to the Pectra upgrade, Ethereum had fallen 33.3% from $2,727 to $1,818 amid broader macro economic pressures with U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and heightened geopolitical tensions.
However, following Trump’s signing of a trade deal with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday, the market started to rise, with Bitcoin quickly reclaiming $100,000. Soon after, Ethereum also reclaimed its $2,000 milestone, before rocketing to $2,400 on Friday for the first time since early March.
UK Treasury minister Darren Jones called the deal a “huge relief,” with the markets possibly taking it as a sign that global trade war tensions may be starting to ease.
Despite Ethereum’s rise in value, according to CoinGlass, Ethereum U.S. spot ETFs have seen three successive days of outflows, with the last day of positive inflows being a week ago.
The wider crypto market is up 3.5% to a total market cap of $3.37 trillion, according to CoinGecko data. The biggest winners out of the top 100 tokens by market capitalization are all Ethereum-based projects. Legacy meme coin Pepe (PEPE) has taken the top spot after rising 43.3% over the past 24 hours, followed by AI agent launcher Virtuals (VIRTUAL), up 24.3%, and decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI), up 21.5% on the day.
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