Main points:

Main points:

1. Ethereum surpassed its previous all-time high over the weekend.

2. The prosperity of the digital market is attributed to the surge of DeFi.

3. U.S. markets will be volatile this week based on earnings reports and the release of U.S. economic data.

January is home to Ethereum. ETH, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has been surging in 2021 and topped an all-time high of $1,439 over the weekend. Below is the record set by Ethereum a week ago.

In fact, on Jan. 1, ethereum was trading at around $730, but has doubled in the past 25 days, according to data provider Nomics. Compared to Bitcoin, which has had a bumpy start to the year, Ethereum has seen year-to-date growth of around 88%, compared to Bitcoin's 10%. What's going on here?

DeFi has once again set off a boom. Projects that decentralize finance or provide lending and mortgage servicing will be back in vogue.

After summer 2020, projects offered 1,000% returns in staking pools, but with a lack of transparency on how these pools operate, more established players appear to have sunk into a fuchsia.

AAVE, the open-source protocol for lending and lending, is up 11% in the past 24 hours, driven by four consecutive days of strong growth.

Uniswap and its underlying governance token UNI are up nearly 20%, and Synthetix Network Token (a decentralized payments network) is also up 7% over the past 24 hours.

Even the decentralized exchange SushiSwap, which represented the highs and lows of the 2020 mining boom, is up nearly 10%, with its platform token SUSHI shattering its all-time high of $8.71 set on September 1, 2020 .

And all of this helps push up the price of ethereum, as these projects use ethereum's ERC token standard to create new tokens. This has led institutional investors - those big buyers who were looking for exotic assets after the March 2020 market crash and found bitcoin - to scrutinize ethereum as another investment with great potential.

Futures contracts, a key way for investors to gain access to price movements in cryptocurrencies, broke out to all-time highs last week, and ethereum saw a spike in network trading volumes. By 2020, transactions on the Ethereum network will exceed $1 trillion, roughly equivalent to the payment leader PAYPAL. All of this suggests that the Ethereum bull run is here to stay.

Yields and Fed meeting play key role for markets

It will be a busy week for market watchers. The Fed is keeping the market going this week with a statement on interest rates and its aggressive asset-buying program. Data on the U.S. economy is due for the fourth quarter, with Facebook, Apple and Tesla all reporting fourth-quarter earnings this week.

With the Fed in place, it seems unlikely that it will escape the pressure of its asset purchase program, currently at $120 billion a month, with interest rates on hold through at least 2023, effectively underwriting market pressure.

The U.S. economy is expected to grow by around 4% by the end of 2020, which is good but not as brisk as the economy's 33% growth in the third quarter.

Finally, this week's earnings are focused on companies that have benefited substantially from the COVID conditions, namely Apple and Facebook. Cook's company is expected to report record revenue in the last quarter. Mark Zuckerberg's embattled Facebook Group is expected to show continued growth in its ad business, despite mass departures from the WhatsApp Messenger platform last year and a boycott of the platform by some advertisers.