This Thursday has been quite an eventful day for the most popular smart contract platform, Ethereum (ETH), as its Berlin upgrade went live, its native token, ETH, hit a new all-time high, gas dropped lower, and the CME Group revealed the records reached by their ETH futures offering.
On April 15, ETH hit another all-time high of USD 2,488 (per Coingecko), as Ethereum took a step towards solving the high fee issue plaguing the network – with its Berlin upgrade today. At 11:55 UTC, ETH is trading at USD 2,432. It’s up by 1% in a day and 22% in a week.
It introduced four Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to the network related to gas costs, reducing them for certain transaction types, and including a new transaction format, ‘envelope’, which enables clients to interpret a transaction based on its type.
Celebrating the Berlin Hard Fork with a bunch of new releases
The main one you'll find hard to miss is the new Method column! pic.twitter.com/0uiyM66h9N
— Etherscan.io (@etherscan) April 15, 2021
Ethereumprice.org shows that the gas price (in gwei, a measure of gas prices.) dropped further today, to 62, compared to 187 gwei on April 14.
Berlin follows the Istanbul and Muir Glacier upgrades, and had first been deployed on the testnets during March. The next upgrade will be London, which would include the hotly debated EIP-1559, and which is estimated to happen in July.
Ether futures reached two new records on April 7: volume at 2,247 contracts (ETH 112,500 equivalent) and open interest at 1,822 contracts (ETH 91,100 equivalent).
In two months since the launch, more than 34,000 total contracts were traded (ETH 1.72m equivalent), averaging 820 contracts traded daily (ETH 41,000), while 36% of overall volume came from outside the US.
“Market participants have increasingly turned to Ether futures to hedge against ether price movements, as indicated by the growing around-the-clock trading activity,” CME said.