The past few days have not been too good for the crypto market, especially the majors like BITCOIN and ETHEREUM. Ethereum (ETH) especially experienced a severe drop earlier this week, dropping by as much as 18% in a matter of a few hours to fall to a two-week low.

However, despite this flash crash, there is some news to cheer for the traders of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency. The rising popularity of DeFi and NFTs as well as increased interest by financial institutions saw the amount of transactions settled in ETH soar to $1.5 trillion through the first quarter of the year. In comparison, through all of 2020, ETH settled transactions worth only $1.3 trillion.

Some of the key examples of increasing institutional interest include Visa’s announcement last month of using the Ethereum blockchain network to settle USDC transactions. In addition, WeWork – leading commercial real estate company based in the US, also announced a partnership with Coinbase and Bitpay to accept payments in cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum.

DeFi and NFTs are another key reason driving increased activity in ETH prices lately. Research by Glassnode reveals that the number of ETH addresses holding over 0.01 tokens has touched a record high of more than 14 million.

The only thing holding Ethereum back from soaring to new ATHs is the issue of high gas fees and congestion. It remains to be seen whether the developers can fix the issue before losing ground to other promising competitors like Cardano, Polkadot and Binance Chain going forward.