Two of the world’s most popular digital currencies rose to records on Monday, with the Bitcoin price eclipsing the $1,400 level for the first time ever.

Ethereum, the world’s second-largest digital token, climbed above $80 for the first time.

Both currencies have surged since the beginning of the year as investors remain optimistic that the Securities and Exchange Commission could soon approve the first bitcoin exchange-traded fund after saying last week that it would reconsider an earlier rejection.

However, some market strategists cautioned that the SEC’s review is part of routine due diligence, and that investors shouldn’t read too much into it. The market regulator rejected two proposed bitcoin ETFs in March; a third is still under consideration, but a decision isn’t imminent.

In April, Japan cleared the way for large institutional money managers and banks to get involved in the space.

And Russian authorities said last month that they would recognize bitcoin and its peers as soon as next year, while the Indian government is leaning toward legalizing bitcoin and other digital currencies, according to local media reports.

And although China has cracked down on money laundering and market manipulation, which has driven volume in digital currencies sharply lower, it also has forced the largest cryptocurrency exchanges to upgrade their anti-money-laundering systems.

“These small things are helping the public at large to feel safe in the investment of Bitcoin,” said Marco Streng, chief executive officer of Genesis Mining. “The more acceptance it gets from around the world, and the more it hits the newspapers with positive headlines, the higher the price will boom.”

Chris Dannen, founder of New York-based cryptoasset fund Iterative Instinct, said the growing adoption of so-called alt-coins—a category that includes every cryptocurrency aside from bitcoin—has in turn benefited bitcoin.

“I think it’s the excitement over alt-coins that’s driving the bitcoin price higher,” Dannen said. Back in February, Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -1.78% , J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM, +0.42% , and a handful of other partners launched the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a computing platform built on top of the Ethereum software that allows businesses to build blockchain-based applications.

Excluding a few brief dips, bitcoin BTCUSD, -0.51% has rallied sharply and consistently since the beginning of the year. It is presently up more than 30% in 2017, after more than doubling in 2016. One coin was recently trading at $1,403, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, which incorporates pricing data from six different exchanges. The price of a single Ethereum token had retreated to $78 in recent trade.

Bitcoin recently touched an all-time high above $1,400

The Ethereum price recently touched an all-time high above $80 a coin.

To be sure, the recent rise of bitcoin and Ethereum hasn’t come without some degree of hand-wringing.

Bitfinex, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, halted all customer withdrawals of U.S. dollars in mid-April after large global banks like Wells Fargo & Co. WFC, +3.33% shut it off from the global financial system.

As a result, the price of bitcoin traded on Bitfinex has rocketed to $1,500 as worried customers swallow a more than $100 premium to safely move their assets off Bitfinex’s platform.

Chris Burniske, blockchain analyst and products lead at ARK Invest, said bitcoin’s foray into record territory is partly the result of a delayed reaction to a slowdown in the bitcoin supply’s rate of growth. Approximately every four years, the number of bitcoins awarded to bitcoin miners is cut in half, effectively reducing the rate of bitcoin inflation.

This phenomenon is known as the halvening, and occurred most recently in July.

“You had the rate at which the supply increases get cut in half, but if demand has continued to climb, well, you can do the math,” Burniske said.