The price of Ethereum hit its highest point in several weeks on Sunday in anticipation of the London hard fork, which contains the highly anticipated and controversial EIP-1559 upgrade. According to data from CoinMarketCap, ETH reached as high as $2,384 on Sunday; at press time, the price had cooled to $2,275.

Still, according to CoinTelegraph, trading volumes remained ‘characteristically’ low over the weekend, reaching just over $18 billion. At press time, Ethereum’s total market capitalization was nearly $265 billion.

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Part of ETH’S positive price movement could also have something to do with the expiry of $230 million in options contracts on Friday. ETH bulls and bears had spread their expectations all over the spectrum; however, ETH bulls began to gain a solid lead around the $2,200 mark.

Ethereum’s Active Addresses Surpassed Bitcoin’s Last Week

The London hard fork, which is expected to be fully implemented on the Ethereum network later in July, is anticipated to impact the price of ETH on several levels.

For one thing, the upgrade introduces a scarcity mechanism that will regularly ‘burn’ ETH tokens, lowering the circulating supply of ETH. The mechanism is slated to make ETH into a ‘hard’ asset. Additionally, the upgrade will change Ethereum into a Proof-of-Stake network, which is slated to reduce transaction fees on the network and lower the network’s carbon footprint, among other things.

A number of analysts are suggesting that exposure to ETH will increase as the implementation of the hard fork draws nearer. CoinTelegraph reported that this already seems to be happening: on-chain data shows that Ethereum registered over 750,000 active addresses last week, surpassing Bitcoin’s number of active addresses.

At the time, analytics firm Santiment said that the moment was historic: “On a day that saw history be made with #Ethereum surpassing #Bitcoin in daily active addresses for the first time, #altcoins came to play. $KSM, $COMP and $ZIL were among many projects to make an imprint on the markets, while $BTC ranged around $34.5k.”

🥳 On a day that saw history be made with #Ethereum surpassing #Bitcoin in daily active addresses for the first time, #altcoins came to play. $KSM, $COMP, and $ZIL were among many projects to make an imprint on the markets, while $BTC ranged around $34.5k. https://t.co/cwjGvrLLeX pic.twitter.com/3AFQ0MHbcT

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) June 29, 2021

Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin is continuing to trade sideways within the $30K-$40K range, where it has been for more than a month.