Ether surged above its all-time high record on Monday. The price increase followed a higher burn rate of tokens and new money flow into the market. This also contributed to pushing Bitcoin towards a new all-time high, turning the cryptocurrency market value to $3 trillion for the first time.

Over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin was last up 6.5% to $65,884 while Ether was up 2.9% surging by as much as 4.6% to a record high of $4,762 on Coinbase.

Ether’s price increase followed the rapid burn rate of tokens on the network. The Ethereum network burned 800,000 ethers during the last three months, according Freddie Evans, Sales Trader at UK-based digital asset broker GlobalBlock.

"The price of ether is increasing with help from the continuing burning reducing supply and anticipation for eths move to proof of stake in the new year moving ether to a far less energy-intensive system expected to reduce ethereum's energy usage by 99%," Evans said.

Furthermore, the launch of an ether backed exchange traded fund might have also contributed to the price increase. According to Bloomberg analysts last week, a first Ethereum futures–based exchange traded fund could launch in the 1^st quarter of 2022.

Bakkt, digital asset manager, also told Insider Saturday that they would allow its clients to buy, hold and sell ether via its app by the end of the year.

Over the last month, Ether – the second-largest crypto by market cap behind Bitcoin has surged 36%. The growing popularity of applications including non-fungible tokens and the development of the Metaverse has impacted the token’s price. Additionally, Bitcoin also benefited with a 24% increase over the month.

"We expect movements like we see now during a bull run; with global interest in crypto seeming to expand exponentially, prices have responded accordingly," Evans said.

"Bitcoin feels like it's gonna have a 7 in front of it soon," Cameron Winklevoss said on Twitter early Monday.

"Bitcoin flirting with (an) all-time high. Time to go parabolic," twin Tyler said on Twitter Monday morning.

Ether’s price increase might suggest that it could hover past Bitcoin in terms of total market size, some analysts suggest that this could happen in the coming months.