"There seems to be a shift in the sentiment in the market compared to a few months back," said hedge fund executive director Ulrik Lykke.
Increased institutional on-chain activities have accompanied bitcoin's latest price rally.
Bitcoin and ether remain well bid as U.S. senators reach a compromise on the crypto provision of the infrastructure bill.
The increase also came at a time when bipartisan support emerged for excluding miners from being considered “brokers” in the U.S. infrastructure bill.
Data aggregators have listed more than 2,000 new crypto assets in the first half of 2021.
Roughly 93% of Tether's commercial paper and certificates of deposit holdings was rated A-2 and above, while 1.5% was rated below A-3.
Despite experiencing outflows for the fifth straight week, assets under management in digital funds hit their highest level since mid-May.
Buyers could remain active on pullbacks this week as bitcoin cleared important technical levels.
The token remains below the 2 1/2-month high of $3,188 reached over the weekend.
A clean break above the 200-day moving average could accelerate prices, according to digital asset firm Zerocap.
Until recently, the manipulable “market cap” was nearly all investors had to go on when measuring the relative value of digital assets. More sophisticated yardsticks are emerging.
Some analysts are optimistic about the broad crypto rally and see further upside, especially for ether.
The latest rally took bitcoin's year-to-date return to 48%, far exceeding the Standard & Poor's 18% gain.
The ether-bitcoin price ratio has broken out to the upside – possibly an indication of a more buoyant risk-taking mood among crypto traders.
The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 5.4%, a post-pandemic low, from 5.9% in June, according to the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics.