Ethereum on a high after European Investment Bank’s $121M digital bond news

Ethereum prices skyrocketed to a new all-time high on Wednesday on the back of positive news from the European Investment Bank.

Ethereum has climbed to $2,709 during early Asian trading on Wednesday, April 28, marking a new peak price for the asset according to Coingecko.

The crypto metrics provider reports a gain of 7% over the past 24 hours, and 15.7% over the past seven days for the world’s second-largest digital asset by market capitalization. The move has pushed the ETH market cap to a record $312 billion.

While there are a range of factors propelling the Ether price, Reuters today attributed it to the news the European Investment Bank’s readying to launch a “digital bond” sale using the Ethereum network.

The EIB plans to issue a two-year 100 million Euro ($US120.8 million) digital bond set to be priced on Tuesday, with the sale to be led by Goldman Sachs, Banco Santander, and Societe Generale, according to analysts at Bloomberg.

On April 23, Societe Generale announced that its subsidiary Societe Generale SFH had issued a 100 million Euro bond as a security token on the public Ethereum blockchain. It was awarded the top triple-A rating by Moody’s and Fitch.

Head of revenue at crypto broker SFOX, Danny Kim, told Reuters that the news has demonstrated a bullish institutional use case for Ethereum, adding that exchange balances are also decreasing adding to the bull case:

“The amount of Ethereum sitting on exchanges continues to drop lower and has been the lowest in the past year. With less supply on exchange available, there’s less likely a chance of a major sell-off.”

If you are not extremely long $ETH and Web3 at this point, it will probably be a rough decade for you

Tradfi banks beginning to issue digital bonds on ETH is unbelievable

— Sisyphus (@0xSisyphus) April 27, 2021

As reported by Cointelegraph, a revival in DeFi related protocols and tokens, coupled with a fall in gas prices could also be driving momentum. At the time of writing the average transaction price on the network had fallen to $10.73 according to Bitinfocharts.

Popular crypto analyst ‘Altcoin Sherpa’, meanwhile, predicted that ETH would continue to outperform BTC in the coming weeks, targeting a price of $3,000.

$ETH: Still think this 1 outperforms BTC in the coming weeks, $3000+ is inevitable. Waiting for the BTC bottom to form (wherever that is) and then take off. #Ethereum $ETHUSD pic.twitter.com/wdFUG0Nkui

— Altcoin Sherpa (@AltcoinSherpa) April 28, 2021