New cryptocurrency $TRUMP surged, briefly hitting a $70 billion market cap

As the overall market goes risk-off amid geopolitical tensions, ethereum has decreased 7% in the last 24 hours and is basically flat for 2026.

The cryptocurrency is hovering just below $3,000, a more than 10% pullback from this year’s high of around $3,350. The recent drawdown is the sharpest in the last 24 hours among its peers. Over the same period, bitcoin is down 3.6%, XRP dipped 5.2%, solana slumped 5.6%, and dogecoin tumbled 4%. 

Meanwhile, leading ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies, which recently announced a $200 million investment into Beast Industries, acquired an additional 35,268 ethereum tokens worth $108 million last week, bringing its total to 4.2 million tokens worth nearly $12.7 billion at current prices. 

The firm also allocated 581,920 tokens for staking, ethereum’s security mechanism. Participation has been on the rise, and the entry queue to start staking is multiple times longer than the exit line.

On Wednesday, the ethereum parent chain logged its highest-ever transaction count at over 2.5 million transactions, a roughly 34% increase from 1.9 million transactions on the first day of the new year, data from blockchain analytics firm Artemis shows. 

Artemis research analyst Alex Weseley told Sherwood News the largest drivers of the network’s transaction growth stems from Circle and Tether’s stablecoins, USDC and USDT, as usage of both are up over 200% year over year. 

“It has also been interesting to see that the average transaction fee has remained low at < $0.20 per transaction, compared to the $52 average transaction fee paid when transaction counts peaked in 2021,” Weseley added.

The all-time high follows the activation of Pectra and Fusaka last year, two network upgrades aimed at enhancing the scalability of ethereum. “The changes ethereum is making to scale the L1 are starting to pay off, though we are still in the early innings,” Weseley said.

The price of ethereum has increased ~7% in the past seven days, outpacing its peers bitcoin, XRP, solana, and dogecoin. Meanwhile, spot ethereum ETFs trading in the US have seen almost $415.9 million in total inflows during the year so far, with $175 million from Wednesday alone, per SoSoValue.