The Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) price is up 2% in the past 24 hours, currently trading at US$58,824 (AU$76,395).
That's only about 4.6% below Bitcoin's record high price of US$61,557, hit on 14 March, giving the world's biggest crypto a current market cap of US$1.1 trillion.
According to data from CoinDesk, more than US$52 billion worth of Bitcoin has exchanged virtual hands in the last 24 hours.
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Bitcoin price mania spreads to Ether price
While the soaring Bitcoin price has garnered the lion's share of the financial news, Ether – the world's second largest crypto with a market cap of US$243 billion – rather quietly hit its own new record high price over the Easter holiday weekend.
On Saturday 1 Ether was trading for an all-time high of US$2,151. Ether has retraced a bit since, currently trading for US$2,113. Still, that's up a stellar 1,173% from 1 year ago, when you could have invested in Ether for US$166.
Part of the past week's price gains appear related to Visa Inc's (NYSE: V) announcement that the global payment giant will roll out a program to use USD Coin (a 'stablecoin') to settle transactions over the Ethereum network.
According to Konstantin Anissimov, executive director at cryptocurrency exchange CEX.IO (quoted by Bloomberg), "The latest backing from Visa Inc. appears to be giving the bulls a new reason to persist in their stride."
Julius de Kempenaer, senior analyst at StockCharts.com adds, "We're now really breaking higher and that will very likely attract buying activity. Ether is gaining in relative strength versus Bitcoin."
Atop that, as Bloomberg reports:
[B]illionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban's comments about owning the digital asset and that it's closest "to a true currency" have increased interest, in addition to the ongoing upgrade of the network, according to Greg Waisman, co-founder and COO of the global payment network Mercuryo.
Why a stabilising price may be good for Bitcoin
The Ether price gains may have outpaced Bitcoin's price rise of late, but that may not be all bad news for Bitcoin's outlook.
That's because, as the analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co point out, lower price volatility could draw in more institutional investors.
In a report last Thursday, the analysts wrote (sourced from Bloomberg):
These tentative signs of Bitcoin volatility normalization are encouraging. In our opinion, a potential normalization of Bitcoin volatility from here would likely help to reinvigorate the institutional interest going forward.
Institutional interest in Bitcoin from the likes of Elon Musk's Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has already been widely credited with supporting the Bitcoin price recently.
Whether increased institutional investment into Bitcoin will normalise the crypto's volatility or send the price even higher remains to be seen.
