Ether outperformance continues into the weekend, trading over $1,600

The price of Ethereum's native token continued its rally into the weekend, trading above $1,600 for much of Sunday, according to data from TradingView.

The coin was up by roughly 4% on Sunday afternoon, continuing a rally that kicked off in the middle of July. It's up about 6% over the last 24-hours. Since bottoming out sightly above $1,000, the price of the coin has appreciated by more than 40%. 

"Ethereum continues to outperform the rest of the cryptos," noted hedge fund LedgerPrime in a market commentary note sent out to counter-parties. "ETH seemed to form a base above the $1.5K level, where it started a new increase and climbed throughout the week to $1.65k, where significant resistance was found."

To be clear, ether isn't the only crypto seeing gains with Solana and MATIC up 4.1% and 5.7% over the last 24 hours. 

Broadly, the market has appreciated by about 19% over the last ten days, while the total market cap climbed past the $1 trillion mark once again.

Bitcoin has progressed at a slower pace than Ethereum, having increased by about 15% in value during the same period.

Ethereum's transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is looming closer. Crypto market maker Cumberland said this week that institutional investors have been increasing long positions on ether.

“This move has been crypto-fundamental: the Sepolia testnet successfully merged to proof-of-stake on July 6th, setting the stage for an early-autumn mainnet merge,” the firm tweeted.

Ethereum's value is still far from its all-time high of around $4,800 in November of last year. The coin's price has been declining since, parallel to other crypto assets, plunging between June and May, amid the wider market turbulence.