Ethereum surged 45% in 5 days after Pectra upgrade

Ethereum has seen a sharp price surge between May 8 and May 12, 2025. According to TradingView, the asset jumped from $1808 to $2624 in just five days — a rise of over 45%. At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading around $2400. Despite a slight correction, it continues to hold strong above the $2300 level.

Ethereum Marks Its Strongest Weekly Rally in Four Years

This kind of performance hasn’t been seen since 2021. During the same period, Ethereum’s market capitalization surpassed that of major companies like Coca-Cola and Alibaba, reaching the 39th spot globally. Meanwhile, Bitcoin recorded a modest 7.6% increase, underlining ETH’s short-term dominance.

Ethereum’s market cap jumped from $217 billion to $307.6 billion. The surge in investor interest is largely attributed to a major network upgrade aimed at improving user experience and blockchain functionality.

Pectra Upgrade Sparks Massive Price Movement

The key trigger behind the rally was the activation of the Pectra hard fork on May 7 — the biggest upgrade since The Merge in 2022. The update includes 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), such as increasing the staking limit from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH, allowing standard EOA accounts to act like smart contracts, and boosting L2 scalability with more BLOB transactions.

Experts highlight that Pectra lays the groundwork for future innovations like gasless transactions. The update went live after addressing technical issues in the Sepolia and Holesky testnets and launching a separate testnet, Hoodi, for final checks. These changes are now running smoothly on mainnet, reinforcing Ethereum’s fundamentals and market appeal.