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Breaking new all-time highs, the recent price action of Ether (ETH) took the crypto market by storm and signaled an official start to alt season.

Several analysts are predicting that Ether will surpass its previous all-time high of $2,130 and continue to outperform Bitcoin in the foreseeable future. .

Price predictions aside, Ethereum is undeniably leading the charge in crypto, being home to flagship decentralized finance and nonfungible token projects.

Although many layer-one projects have been labeled as “Ethereum killers” over the years, Ethereum is only now facing real competition, which has come mostly from its scalability and congestion issues.

Due to the Ether price surge, the total value locked in DeFi protocols is now over $61 billion.

Just like Bitcoin is serving as a gateway for institutional investors to enter the crypto market, Ether is giving those same investors the opportunity to experiment with DeFi.

The number of institutional investors flocking to DeFi is only expected to grow, helping bring liquidity, reduced volatility and increased credibility to the industry.

Many DeFi projects are already developing solutions catered to institutional investors, offering risk management tools and other institutional-grade services — similar to traditional finance — in order for these companies to be able to hedge their positions and minimize risk.

On the other hand, the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 upgrade holds the potential to effectively scale the network and bring forth greater decentralized application and DeFi adoption.

Although many projects are exploring alternatives and some predictions suggest Ethereum could lose a large portion of its NFT market dominance to BSC, it seems that the Ethereum network effect is still too strong.

Although it seems that crypto has only recently cemented itself as an institutional asset class, the truth is that many Fortune 500 companies already invested in Ether almost a year ago.

It’s entirely possible that big institutional investors already own Ether but haven’t made it public yet.

With Grayscale continuing to grow its Ether trust and large corporations continuing to stock up on Bitcoin and Ether, it’s clear that institutional money is one of the factors behind the latest price rally.

Additionally, Visa’s announcement that it will allow partners to settle transactions on Ethereum and the current low supply of Ether on exchanges have played a part?