Ether, the second biggest cryptocurrency in the world, has been outperforming bitcoin as of late, with the ETH to BTC ratio jumping 4.72 percent over the past 24 hours.
While the total market cap of crypto jumps over $140 billion over the past week, Ether has been catching up to bitcoin. Ether climbed 12 percent over that period, while bitcoin chalked up gains of just 6 percent.
The gains are coinciding with anticipation of “the merge,” a software migration for crypto that could allow it to process transactions at a hundredth of its current energy. It’s expected that this event will occur sometime this year.
Ethereum developers performed a successful public “test merge” on a test network last week, sparking newfound support for the cryptocurrency.