Ethereum Jumps to All Time High at $760
In US market the ethereum price has surpassed $750 for the first time in history, recording 20% increase in value over the past 24 hours.
In the past few days, nearly 25 percent of global Ether trade was accounted on US market. The flagship cryptocurrency exchange of Coinbase called GDAX, and Bitfinex processed 23 percent of the global Ethereum exchange market’s Ether trades.
Currently, the daily trading volume of Ether is close to $5 billion, more than four times larger than Bitcoin Cash, the third largest cryptocurrency in the global market behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.
What is Pushing Ethereum Price Up?
A billionaire investor Mike Novogratz predicted earlier this month, the price of Ether could have a three-times grow throughout 2018. Currently Ethereum is the only public blockchain network which can compete against bitcoin.
In fact, as of current, the Ethereum blockchain network processes more transactions than all of the cryptocurrencies in the market including bitcoin combined at 820,000 transactions per day.
The potential of Ethereum also demonstrated with recently launched applications, such as CryptoKitties and EtherDelta. Those applications are useful beyond finance.
Already, CryptoKitties has processed $15 million worth of digital kittens within the past two months and other dapps like EtherDelta have also been processing more than 80,000 transactions on a daily basis.
Vitalik Buterin Not Convinced
The co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin was asked , whether the the half of trillion dollar market valuation of cryptocurrencies can be justified.
He said:
“So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we earned it? How many unbanked people have we banked? How many decentralized applications have we created that have substantial usage? Low added value per user for using a blockchain is fine, but then you have to make up for it in volume. How much value is stored in smart contracts that actually do anything interesting? How many Venezuelans have actually been protected by us from hyperinflation?
At these days, the global finance sector being transformed by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. But as Buterin told cryptocurrencies in the market including Ethereum have not done enough to solve the problems he mentioned in his statement. At least not sufficient to justify the $0.5 trillion market valuation.
“In the last 3 years, the crypto market cap has increased by 200x, but I definitely don’t feel like crypto’s potential has increased by 200x. In some key sectors it has even regressed,” Buterin added.
But, Buterin also noted that these questions must be asked for the cryptocurrency community to increase developer activity around leading blockchains and collaborate on improving the infrastructures of blockchain networks like Ethereum.
