The price of Ethereum has increased by 11% in the past 24 hours to highs of $2,640. The rise caps off a 24% increase in the past week. 

Ethereum has brought several coins that use its smart contracts along for the ride. Most of the top decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens have also increased in price in the past day. 

DeFi growth

Uniswap (UNI), which has a market cap of $15.6 billion and is the largest DeFi token by this measure, has risen by 12% in the past day. At a price of $27, the coin, which powers the governance protocol of the eponymous decentralized exchange, has increased by nearly 28% during the past week. 

Chainlink (LINK)—UNI’s closest competitor with a market cap of $13.4 billion—has increased by 15% today and by a staggering 32% during the past week. Currently, LINK, which powers a decentralized oracle network, is worth $31. 

Other DeFi tokens have also grown in the past week. Aave (AAVE) and Maker (MKR) have increased by just over 10% in the past day and by 6% and 1% over the past seven days, respectively.

Wider market jubilance

The crypto market’s largest DeFi tokens might be going up, but they’re not the only cryptocurrencies that are on the rise. 

Despite renewed scrutiny on its carbon footprint, Bitcoin is also increasing in value. The flagship cryptocurrency—currently priced at $36,900—has increased by almost 6% during the last week and 4% during the last 24 hours. 

XRP, the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has surged in price in the past few days. Now valued at $1.02, XRP has grown by 15% today and 27% during the last week. 

XRP’s rise follows Ripple’s recent legal victory against the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which in December 2020 filed a lawsuit alleging that Ripple raised $1.3 billion by selling XRP in unregistered securities sales.

On Sunday, Ripple, the payments company whose co-founders created XRP, stopped the regulator from accessing records of advice that Ripple has sought or received about the legal status of XRP. 

Ethereum developers have fixed a loophole in a forthcoming upgrade that would have left the network vulnerable to fake large transactions.

Scheduled for mid-July, EIP-1559 burns some ETH spent on processing transactions instead of giving it all to miners, as is currently the case. The proposal aims to reduce the volatility of Ethereum’s transaction fee.

Under EIP-1559, users can “tip” miners and the Ethereum network to speed up transactions. To do this, they specify the maximum amount they are willing to pay.

Martin Holst Swende, an Ethereum core developer from Sweden, worked out on Thursday that EIP-1559 placed no limit on the maximum amount a user could pay to speed up transactions.

An attacker could thus insert an absurdly high number to overwhelm the network, even if they didn’t have the funds to pay for the tip.

“Because the fields in 1559 are maximums, you could abuse this, not actually pay those huge gas values, and spam the network,” Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko tweeted Friday.

Prior to 1559, this is not possible because if you want to create a transaction with a huge gas price, you actually _need_ to have that amount of ETH, and if your txn is included, you will _pay_ that amount.

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) May 28, 2021

To close that loophole, the developers implemented a solution proposed by Swende: four lines of codes that capped transactions at a limit of 2^256, a widely used cryptographic hash function that also underpins Bitcoin.

On May 14, Ethereum developers agreed to delay until December a “difficulty bomb” that would make severely slow down the network.

The difficulty bomb is designed to encourage Ethereum developers to hasten the development of Ethereum 2.0, the long-awaited upgrade to the Ethereum network that would reduce fees and increase throughput.

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