Cryptocurrency Ethereum price hits record high, rising over 5,000% since start of the year

Cryptocurrency Ethereum has hit another record high after bitcoin and is now up more than 5,000 per cent since the start of the year.

Ethereum prices surged to record levels yesterday, after bitcoin also hit all-time highs, as appetite for digital assets continued to grow.

The cryptocurrency was trading at around $407.10 in early morning trading yesterday, as per data from industry website Coinmarketcap. This was a record level which marked a more than 5,001 per cent rise in price since 1 January when ethereum was trading at $7.98.

The rise comes after bitcoin traded over $3,000 for the first time on Sunday, continuing its huge rally for the year.

"The strong interest in bitcoin does boost investors' appetite for alternative cryptocurrencies where superior gains are also being seen," Pavel Matveev, co-founder of Wirex, a personal finance app that provides a cryptocurrency wallet and debit card, told CNBC by email.

"There is some correlation between cryptocurrencies in this sense but there is also fundamental demand for Ethereum in its own right. Ethereum and bitcoin aren't directly competing as they serve different needs."

Ether is the name of the cryptocurrency running on the ethereum blockchain, which was the technology that underpinned the digital coin. However, ethereum was also used as shorthand for the digital currency.

Meanwhile, digital currency exchange Coinbase said yesterday it was experiencing an outage due to an increase in traffic and trading volume.

Coinbase, among the world's largest digital currency companies, with operations across 32 countries, said in a statement to Reuters that its engineers and support teams had been working to keep up with the volume.

With demand for crypto-assets soaring with the creation of new funding for start-ups using blockchain technology, the market capitalisation of digital currencies had increased by around 95 per cent to $106 billion over the past month.