The digital asset gained as much as 3.5% to US$4,403.93, topping the previous record of US$4,379.62 reached in May. Other smaller tokens including Binance Coin and Solana rallied. Ether is now worth about US$520 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.com.

Ether’s latest milestone comes as the digital token has far outperformed Bitcoin throughout this year with a sixfold increase amid surging retail and institutional investor interest in the space.

Bitcoin has risen some 40% this month to reach a record of almost US$67,000 following the debut of the first Bitcoin-linked exchange-traded fund in the US

Ether underpins the affiliated Ethereum Network, the dominant blockchain used for thousands of decentralised applications. The system got a further boost this week after a successful upgrade designed to make it faster and more energy-efficient.

“On-chain activity metrics for Ethereum appear to have found support and are reaching multi-month highs,” said Sean Farrell and Will McEvoy, digital asset strategists with Fundstrat in a report Thursday.

Measures including transaction rate, new addresses and active addresses have shown strong growth this month after suffering declines in May, the strategists said.