Ethereum has surpassed $4,000 amid growing crypto demand. Yahoo Finance’s Akiko Fujita and Zack Guzman share the details.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: We start with the changing of the guard happening in the crypto world here, as we see Ethereum take off more than 436%. The gains so far this year far outpacing Bitcoin. And Akiko, as we were discussing last week with our guests, a lot of speculation here in terms of what those network upgrades might do in the back half of 2021 for Ether when it comes to making it a more sustainable alternative to Bitcoin.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, we had Megan Kaspar on Friday from Magnetic. And we, of course, are talking about her because she made the right call to say that she expected Ether to trade in the mid 3,000s. Here we are talking about that, upping the price even beyond that. And she said it could go from 8,000 to 10,000 by the end of the year. So, changing of the guard or sort of, you know, Ether catching up to Bitcoin. Call it what you will, but certainly a lot of things lining up for that to push even higher.

Zack, you know, you’ve talked a lot about of this move to DeFi that has also been supportive of Ether. We’ve also talked about the rise of NFTs. A lot of that built on Ethereum, so there’s a number of factors that seem to be lining up specifically for this prize to push higher.

But of course, we can’t talk about the crypto space without talking about Dogecoin because it was the weekend of Elon Musk. So he says it’s a hustle. How do you interpret that? I mean, we were talking about Dogecoin, how much it has risen over the last year, or this year alone, about 800%. It lost about 30% of its value during that appearance. It seems like he sort of alluded to the fact that it is a bit of a joke. But a lot of people still buying into it. And here we have SpaceX now making an announcement on DogeCoin, too.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, it’s kind of funny to think of Elon Musk’s appearance here on SNL as kind of a buy the rumor, sell the news event. But that’s what it looked like it was. When you look at the price action in Doge, of course, a lot of people were expecting some pretty big moves from him coming on and talking about it. To hear him, I’m sure hearts were shattered across the globe here when we think about Elon Musk saying that– you hear the word hustle coming out of his mouth.

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But as you were pointing out, kind of weakness in the price moves even before that happened. But a lot was built up ahead of this, Akiko. And I think that’s a piece of it, you know, that that’s just kind of how these things tend to go. Whether it’s crypto or stocks, when expectations run high, some of that fizzles out. But I mean, when you think about where that’s at and the SpaceX news you’re talking about, it was an April Fool’s joke tweet that he tweeted out that they would literally put Dogecoin on the move.

But SpaceX kind of making that announcement over the weekend, and I wonder how much that may have been timed to what the price cratering was on after his SNL appearance, why he would have made this announcement now. But putting it literally on the moon, as that’s the plan there with their rocket. But Akiko, I mean, when we look at that space, to your point, whether it’s Dogecoin or else, I mean, now, on Gemini, you can earn interest on your Doge holdings at the Winklevoss trading platform there in Gemini.

So this is kind of really, right now, advancements in the DeFi space. And you think about how much is locked up there, at last check, it was north of $40 billion back in April, just in terms of $40 billion locked up in decentralized finance and smart contracts we’re talking about, that would make DeFi, by its whole, the 55th largest bank in the US in under a year’s time frame. So that’s how quickly money is pouring into some of these projects to earn yield at what is already historically a very low interest rate environment. And more people are turning to things like that.

AKIKO FUJITA: And Zack, to sort of sum up how many people are actually watching SNL, how many people are actually trading Dogecoin on Elon Musk’s appearance, Robinhood had an outage on the back of that. We got this tweet in the middle of SNL, saying essentially that they were flooded with sell orders. You can imagine the platform is going to get a lot of complaints yet again.

But the fact that so many people were looking to sell off the back of what we heard from Elon Musk during SNL, I mean– I don’t know– that takes the conversation up a whole notch. I found myself Saturday night watching SNL, watching the price action in Doge, and I mean, that sort of pretty much sums up where we are with this price action, at least specifically with Doge.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, or, you know, how it’s taking things away. Now SNL can’t even be funny anymore. It can’t be our escape. It’s also now more work for us to do when we’re watching these things.