by Rushali 
The crypto market is enjoying a bull run for the last few months. Ether has crossed the psychological level of $2000 on Friday. ETH has touched a new all-time high of $2033 which is up by 6.33% from the last 24 hours. Its market capitalization has reached $233.3 billion. The cryptocurrency is up 172.5% year-to-date.
The Ethereum hitting $2000 is a very important event but it is overshadowed by another cryptocurrency bitcoin reaching its $1 trillion market value for the first time and raising almost $5,000 in a 24-hour period.
There are three main reasons behind this current bull run of Ether and that are:
decentralized finance (DeFi),
Ethereum 2.0 staking, and eth market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)
Ethereum blockchain is the main thing behind the apps based on DeFi. And ether-based apps automatically raise demand for ether as a currency.
Eth 2.0 is an in-progress redesign of the Ethereum network based on a new consensus mechanism called proof-of-stake (PoS) and database sharding. Some 2.7% of ethereum worth $6 billion has been deposited on the Eth 2.0 blockchain. Those funds are further locked for roughly the next 12 months.
Then many institutional investors have started taking interest in the ether. On Feb 8, CME has launched eth futures and it had recorded a tremendous response on the first day.
