Ether (ETH) has overtaken Bitcoin (BTC) in terms of traded value

The USD value of ETH transfers has exceeded the value of BTC transfers. One more step towards the flippening for Ethereum?

ETH transfer value explodes

The value of ETH transactions reached $3.15 billion on September 6, compared to $2.94 billion for BTC. It had already exceeded that of Bitcoin briefly on September 1, but before that, the event had not taken place since July 2018.

Yesterday, however, BTC had the upper hand again. Coinmetrics recorded $2.37 billion for Bitcoin, and ETH “only” transferred 1.82 billion dollars.

Coinmetrics traded value BTC and ETH (Source: coinmetrics.io)

The surge in the value of ETH transfers is of course a sign of Ethereum’s health. The Flippening Index site, which lists key indicators for comparing Ethereum and Bitcoin, also shows that the former is now exceeding the latter in several areas:

The Flippening Index (Source: Blockchaincenter)

The number of transactions, transaction volume, fees, and number of nodes are now higher at Ethereum than at Bitcoin. However, this is mitigated by the market cap of BTC, which still greatly exceeds that of ETH (189 billion dollars for the first, against 38 billion dollars for the second).

Where does the volume come from?

The volume of Ethereum is partly due to the explosion of DeFi which has put Ethereum in the spotlight since the start of the summer.

However DeFi is not the only reason for this growth with crypto investor Doven Wan recently saying that the price of Ethereum is partly supported by Ponzi schemes.

One of such is the dynamism of Forsage which is the Ethereum version of PlusToken. In the last four months, Forsage has appeared at the top three of the biggest consumer of gas.

The fact that it is a scam and has such influence on Ethereum is problematic. This is because if Forsage suddenly collapses, it could have serious consequences for the ETH price.

As at the time of writing it is reported that the Ponzi Scheme has siphoned over $200 million in Ethereum in recent months. Therefore a fall could affect ETH price.

It will be interesting to see if Ethereum maintains its current volumes in the coming weeks.