Market Wrap: Bitcoin Ascends to $16.8K; Uniswap and Tether 35% of Ethereum Transactions

Bitcoin is knocking at the gates of $17,000 while Ethereum's transaction growth in 2020 is a positive indicator of future financial use cases.

Bitcoin trading around $16,829 as of 21:00 UTC. Gaining 6.1% over the previous 24 hours.

Bitcoin's price made big gains Monday, turning bullish out the gate from a weak weekend and hitting as high as $16,851, according to CoinDesk 20 data.

Based on CoinDesk 20 data, the last time bitcoin was at this price level was back on Jan. 6, 2018, when the daily high was at $17,211.

According to several analysts, the climbing value of bitcoin is also giving the world's oldest cryptocurrency an increasing use as value storage for lending, both from centralized players and in decentralized finance, or DeFi.

Since November 2019, the amount of bitcoin "Locked" in DeFi, for example, has skyrocketed from 1,422 to 174,673 BTC, a 12,183% increase.

"DeFi also allows the retail market to access those popular lending solutions thanks to the Ethereum network."

Shah also speculates that all this bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain may decrease the separation between blockchains.

Since the start of July, the Ethereum network has been averaging over one million transactions per day, according to data aggregator Glassnode.

Token swapping and stablecoins are a big part of this, as 35% of the network's transactions are on Uniswap and involve tether on Monday, according to Eth Gas Stationhttps://ethgasstation.