Ethereum hits record $4,600, bitcoin whales return to buying patterns

Zack Guzman and Jared Blikre are in the Crypto Corner reporting cryptocurrency ethereum's record high at $4,600, where buyers invest to offset gas prices, and bitcoin buys resume the trend of buying again to diversify portfolios.

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JARED BLIKE: Welcome back and time now for our "Crypto Corner" where we have Ether back to 40-- not back, it's at 4,600, hit it briefly, scaled back. That's a record high. By the way, switch places with the S&P 500 yesterday and it did it again today. Also, the SEC is delaying its decision on in Valkyrie Bitcoin ETF, that's a physical one, until next year.

And guess what? You heard it here first on Yahoo Finance when Valkyrie CEO Leah Wald joined the show nearly two weeks ago. And she outlined her timeline expirations for SEC approval. Let's take a listen.

LEAH WALD: Definitely, the SEC is looking. I think that the futures ETF is an incredible first step, to your point. We filed our spot Bitcoin ETF, way back in January, January 22nd, we do think that that is the Holy Grail, but we don't think it's going to be approved anytime soon.

So I think that the SEC is going to be watching this week very closely. They're going to be considering how this goes, what are the next steps. I think that they are very much following the market movements.

There you go, the game planned as expected. Per Gensler and what he's been saying about the approval process lately. But, Zach I want to get your take on Ether, Ethereum, $4,600. We've seen the development of the adoption of Ether, but on Twitter I just keep seeing all these complaints about the high gas prices.

In order to use it, the smart contracts that cost a lot of money and there are developments in place to ease that with layer two currently and layer one, I'm just wondering what you're thinking about that right now.

ZACH GUZMAN: There's a lot of different things going on there, Jared. When we think about Ethereum and the price calls we've heard from analysts for 10,000, to get there, it has a lot to do with the disinflationary aspects of Ethereum. Essentially, they're making changes to the network to burn Ethereum coins in those transactions.

So you're left with basically disinflationary pressures, which is something that I don't think a lot of people watching this space or just watching the prices would really understand. So that is a key fundamental driver for how you get to that $10,000 price level, according to the analysts that have them.

But to your point, Jared, when it comes to interacting with the network itself, those gas fees do restrict the entry points in terms of when people would start buying NFTs here. If you don't have any money in Ethereum, you're going to be paying those fees and have your entry basis here in dollars which is getting more expensive as we sit here at all time highs.

But there is those layer twos, which are essentially the settlement layer on top of Ethereum. So instead of paying those high gas fees to do everything on the Ethereum chain, you're recording transaction data above it on a different chain that's cheaper to do so and then it gets passed along and finalized on Ethereum.

So there's different ways to relieve some of that pressure in terms of high gas fees. There's also other chains getting built out there stealing away some of the share of what we're seeing built on Ethereum. So there are two dynamics playing out here, but to your point I guess broader, when we look at more people opening up.

Our friend Pompe, Anthony Pompliano, is flagging this before, Glassnode data showing that we've now hit an all time high number in terms of Bitcoin addresses that have a balance of at least 0.01 Bitcoin.

So in terms of not just depth from some big players that are adding to their wallets, but also I guess-- what's the other word? Not depth, but breadth in terms of what we're seeing people come in here. So you want both of those things if you're going to keep churning to new all time highs and of course that's Bitcoin, maybe not Ether, but those two certainly go hand in hand.

JARED BLIKE: Yeah, and it is good to see those large, whether they're institutional or large retail players, coming back in. That's been an important psychological market tell something that I look to in terms of sentiment going back years. And there are various ways of measuring it, but good to see that the big guys are back, Zach.

ZACH GUZMAN: The big guy's back, little guys jumping in, you got a lot of reasons to be bullish here if you believe our analysts here say in $10,000 in short order. So we'll see what happens.