On Wednesday (March 24), Mike Dudas, the founder of crypto news and research firm The Block, who joined Paxos on February 9 as VP, Head of Stablecoin Business Development, explained why he believes that the Ethereum (ETH) price “is about to rip.”

According to data by TradingView, around 08:20 UTC on March 24, on crypto exchange Bitstamp, the Ethereum price went reached its intraday high of $1718.71.

Currently (as of 08:35 UTC on March 24), per data by CryptoCompare, $ETH is trading around $1713.02, which means that in the past 24-hour period the Ethereum price has gone up 1.84%; in the year-to-date (YTD) period, ETH-USD is up 132.38%.

On March 17, Messari research analyst Ryan Watkins explained to Austin Calvert, the host of YouTube channel “Fintech Today” how Ethereum could flip Bitcoin over the coming decade.

Then on Monday (March 22), Watkins explained why ETH is the only non-stablecoin cryptoasset that he uses as money.

On the same day, crypto intelligence firm Coin Metrics released a research report titled “The Ethereum Gas Report”. According to this report, “Ethereum transaction fees have shot up to new highs in early 2021” (with the median transaction fee, so far, above $10 for most of the year).

Here is Coin Metrics explaining why Ethereum’s transaction fees have been so high in 2021:

Part of the growth in transaction fees has been due to the sharp increase in ETH price. As ETH gets more valuable, transaction fees get more and more expensive when measured in USD. But it’s also due to a large increase in gas prices caused by network congestion.

The report concludes by saying that although “EIP-1559 will help improve Ethereum’s transaction fee user experience,” it “likely won’t fix the high gas price problem.” However, the good news is that “Ethereum scalability solutions are on the way, which will be the true long-term solution towards decreasing transaction fees.”

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The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.