Ether Crossed $4,000 as Ethereum’s Market Rally Accelerated

Ether crossed $4,000 on September 3, 2021 for the first time since May 15, marking a renewed test of the price territory reached during the cryptocurrency market’s May peak.

The move was an intraday threshold, not a closing price. Forbes recorded ether at $4,022.47 shortly before 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, while Blockworks reported ETH at $3,943.22 at 4 p.m. Eastern. Reuters separately confirmed that ether had passed $4,000 before falling below the mark. Together, those observations establish that the threshold was crossed while also showing why a single event-day price can be misleading in a continuously traded market.

This is a 2026 reconstruction of the September 3 record, not a claim that this text was published contemporaneously.

What the price observations establish

The strongest supportable conclusion is narrow: ether traded above $4,000 during September 3, 2021 and then moved back below that level by later U.S. trading-hour snapshots. The available reports do not identify one shared exchange, ETH/USD venue, consolidated index, or volume-weighted methodology. Their figures therefore should not be combined into an official daily high or close.

Crypto markets operate continuously across exchanges without a universal closing auction. Venue liquidity, currency pairs, timestamp selection, and data aggregation can all produce different highs and daily candles. The $4,022.47 figure is best treated as a contemporaneous Forbes snapshot, while the $3,943.22 figure is Blockworks’ stated 4 p.m. Eastern observation.

Reuters described $4,000 as ether’s first crossing of that threshold since May 15. That comparison measures the elapsed period between reported intraday threshold events; it does not mean ether remained below $4,000 at every venue or tick throughout the interval.

Why Ethereum was leading the discussion

Contemporaneous coverage attributed part of the momentum to demand surrounding non-fungible tokens, many of which were issued and traded through Ethereum applications. Reuters presented that explanation as an analyst’s assessment, not a demonstrated causal calculation. Blockworks similarly connected the rally with NFT activity and decentralized-finance usage.

The distinction matters because an ETH price move cannot, by itself, reveal which buyers participated or why. NFT demand, broader cryptocurrency risk appetite, leverage, exchange flows, macroeconomic conditions, and expectations about Ethereum could all affect the market simultaneously. No source reviewed for this reconstruction isolated the contribution of any one factor.

September 3 also followed Ethereum’s London network upgrade, which activated at block 12,965,000 on August 5, 2021. The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement identified EIP-1559 among the upgrade’s protocol changes. EIP-1559 introduced a dynamically adjusted base fee that the protocol burns, while miners received priority fees under the proof-of-work system then in operation.

That mechanism gave market participants a new framework for discussing ETH supply, but it did not guarantee a falling supply or a rising price. The EIP itself warned that net supply would depend on whether burned base fees exceeded new issuance. Connecting London directly to the September 3 price threshold would therefore exceed the primary record.

What the milestone meant

Ether’s return above $4,000 showed that the market had recovered much of its decline from May 2021 and that Ethereum-linked activity had become a central part of the broader cryptocurrency rally. It did not establish a new record, a durable support level, or proof that NFT demand caused the move.

The defensible event-day reading is that September 3 produced a verified intraday market milestone under active, fragmented trading conditions. Any stronger claim about causation, investor composition, or the durability of the rally would require exchange-level trade data and a defined analytical method that the contemporaneous reports did not provide.