EthereumPrice

Thanks to a sky rocketing price, Ethereum has grabbed the attention of many hundreds of thousands of new investors. Those same investors are no doubt looking at the last 48 hours in disbelief – possibly renewing some initial scepticism about the future of crypto. The 24 hour changes on coinmarketcap.com are – quite frankly – a bloody mess. But hardened cryptoasset investors will be drooling at the sight.

We have been here before. We’ll be here again. And the fundamentals of Ethereum and others remain unchanged.

For those looking for some speculation as to what happened in the last 48 hours:

• This Senate bill in the United States grabbed mass attention.
• Bitcoin may split in two in the first week of August.

V1.3 Release notes:

• Graphing updated to allow for more granularity
• Timeframe preferences are now available at the top right; no longer forced to only “Today’s” changes
• Users can now reset cookies from the preferences menu – deletes all cookies and resets to standard ETH/USD weighted average price
• 5-minutely data will now be available for up to 1 month (collecting from now)

I will be adding some useful information to help new users purchase and secure Ethereum in the coming weeks.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and a dozen or more altcoins have all had dramatic price increases in recent weeks. Volatility is as high as ever, but the general direction for a huge number of these coins has been upwards. This increase in market capitalization across multiple cryptocurrencies hasn’t been seen before, and could be indicative of a large stream of “new money” funnelling into the ecosystem. In the past few weeks, there have been a series of positive news stories and developments in the blockchain industry as a whole including:

• SEC gives Bitcoin ETF a possible second shot
• Japan legalises Bitcoin; causing massive demand in the country
• Ethereum ENS launches, attracting $10M in auction bids
• Japan’s largest bank partners with the consortium blockchain, Ripple (XRP)
• Russia plans to legitimize Bitcoin; with the country’s largest retailer Ulmart, announcing they will accept the cryptocurrency
• Australia to treat Bitcoin “like money” from June 1st 2017, dramatically improving its position with regards to taxation
• Litecoin successfully activates Segregated Witness (a scaling fix which can be applied to Bitcoin)
• ShapeShift.io announces its plans to become a smart-contract driven decentralized exchange (full details not yet known, but anticipated to be operating on the Ethereum blockchain)

Investors have always been nervous of cryptocurrency competition, often speculating that one’s rise may lead to another’s decimation. What has transpired in 2017 so far is that an increase in cryptocurrency adoption as whole has tremendous effects on the price of each coin, and that a price rise of one does not come at the expense of another. This year is showing itself to be the year of the blockchain ecosystem (Bitcoin, Ethereum and altcoins), and I only anticipate that this will get stronger as interoperability between chains takes hold in 2018.

Ether Classic was formed after the Ethereum blockchain hard forked in the summer of 2016. The hard fork was the result of a policy decision to rollback the DAO attack in which $60M of investor funds were stolen. Due to this decision not having the full backing of the community, a separate branch of Ether forked away, now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Ethereum Classic is a separate blockchain to Ethereum, and the two should not be confused as they are now wildly different. Ethereum has the backing of the Ethereum Foundation, its development team and the roadmap outlined in Ethereum’s crowdsale – which includes the introduction of Proof of Stake, Sharding and so on. Ethereum Classic does not share these attributes, however there is much speculation over ETC’s future value as a digital asset, with Barry Silbert – owner of Grayscale Investments LLC – forming the Ethereum (ETC) Investment Trust.