Ether Set a Record Above $2,100 as Crypto’s Rally Broadened

Ether rose above $2,100 on April 3, 2021, setting a record as the cryptocurrency market’s rally broadened beyond bitcoin. A contemporaneous Bloomberg report placed the intraday high at approximately $2,144, while a CF Benchmarks series cited shortly afterward put the milestone at $2,106.

The difference is not necessarily a contradiction. Cryptocurrency traded continuously across multiple exchanges, with no single official closing auction or universal intraday high. Venue selection, eligible trades, currency pairs, aggregation rules and cutoff times could all produce different measurements. The defensible event-day conclusion is therefore that ether established a record above $2,100, not that one price represented every market.

What the market record established

Ether was the native asset of the Ethereum network and the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization on April 3. It had first moved above $2,000 briefly in February 2021, then returned to that threshold at the beginning of April before advancing into new territory.

Bloomberg’s April 3 report said ether had reached approximately $2,144 and described its 2021 advance as nearly threefold. That characterization used an intraday market measure rather than a regulated closing price. The report also estimated ether’s market value at about $230 billion, compared with approximately $1.1 trillion for bitcoin, using CoinMarketCap data available at the time. Market capitalization was calculated from token price and estimated circulating supply; it did not measure cash invested in the asset or liquidity available at the quoted price.

The milestone mattered because bitcoin was not making a corresponding record on April 3. Ether’s relative strength indicated that the 2021 crypto expansion was supporting a distinct market for a programmable blockchain asset rather than lifting only bitcoin. It did not, by itself, prove that network usage caused the price increase or that the valuation was sustainable.

Institutional infrastructure had begun to form

The market context had changed before the record. CME Group launched cash-settled Ether futures on February 8, 2021, giving eligible participants a U.S.-regulated derivatives contract based on the CME CF Ether-Dollar Reference Rate. CF Benchmarks reported that 1,856 contracts, representing about 92,000 ether, traded during the contract’s first week.

Those figures showed the presence of an institutional hedging and exposure channel, but they did not reveal whether traders were net bullish or bearish. Every futures position had both a long and a short side, and futures turnover could not be added directly to spot demand.

Visa supplied another important piece of contemporaneous context on March 29. The payments company announced that it had used USD Coin to settle a transaction with Visa over Ethereum in a pilot involving Crypto.com and Anchorage. Visa defined settlement as the exchange of funds between participating institutions, not a consumer paying a merchant directly with ether. The pilot demonstrated an institutional use of Ethereum’s infrastructure; it did not require Visa to purchase ether as a treasury asset or prove that the announcement caused the April 3 price record.

Protocol expectations were also visible. The Ethereum Foundation had scheduled the Berlin mainnet upgrade for block 12,244,000, expected around April 15, after testnet deployments in March. On April 3, Berlin remained a planned upgrade rather than a completed event, so its eventual operation cannot be projected backward into the market record.

What remained uncertain

The April 3 milestone verified a market price, not a fundamental valuation. The reviewed sources did not provide a controlled method for separating the influence of derivatives access, Visa’s pilot, protocol expectations, decentralized-finance activity, speculation or broader monetary conditions.

Different price records also used different observation methods. Without an archived consolidated trade file, the precise all-market high remains unknowable. The historically supportable statement is narrower: multiple contemporaneous records agree that ether crossed $2,100 and established a new high on April 3, 2021.