Following the expected surge in Bitcoin price, Ethereum recorded a staggering 16 percent daily surge in value, increasing from $265 to $317 within a 24-hour period.
Following the expected surge in Bitcoin price, Ethereum recorded a staggering 16 percent daily surge in value, increasing from $265 to $317 within a 24-hour period.
Since its initial surge in value, Ether price, the native token of Ethereum, stabilized at around $282, recording a nearly $20 increase within a single day.
Normally, the entire cryptocurrency market fluctuates based on Bitcoin price. When Bitcoin’s value increases, other alternative cryptocurrencies or altcoins tend to follow.
The recent rise of Bitcoin price played a vital role in creating upward momentum for the rest of the cryptocurrency market.
Ethereum increased at a significantly larger rate than other cryptocurrencies, climbing back from its previous $19 bln market cap to over $27 bln.
Often, it becomes difficult to state exact driving factors in the rise of Ethereum. Hype around the initial coin offering (ICO) market has been a major driving factor as ICOs started to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in their campaigns.
But, perhaps most importantly, as BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp emphasized, the best indicator of the growth and stability of a cryptocurrency is developer activity around it.
“We found that the best predictor of a cryptocurrency's exchange rate is the amount of developer activity around it,” said Ivey Business School professor JP Vergne.
Recently, it was revealed that some of the largest technology and financial companies including Visa, IBM, Microsoft and USAA are actively seeking for talents within the Ethereum community.
Mainly due to the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, an increasing number of large-scale conglomerates and multi-billion dollar companies have started to build applications on top of the Ethereum protocol.
Visa stated:
“We're seeking a strong developer experienced with Ethereum and Blockchain architecture to be a part of a team tasked with building distributed application. Our ideal candidate has built and released distributed applications, has worked with the Ripple, R3, Ethereum and/or Bitcoin Blockchain, and has experience with Solidity.”
The Ethereum industry itself has also seen massive growth in regions such as China and South Korea, which are relatively new to Ethereum and applications around it.
In fact, China has become such a large market for Ethereum in terms of trading volume and development that Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and developer of Ethereum, have provided several presentations in Mandarin to the Chinese Ethereum industry.
If demand from large-scale companies and development firms toward Ethereum continues to increase and the ICO market begins to demonstrate actual decentralized applications that can serve active user bases and experience success, the value of Ethereum will likely continue to surge in the upcoming months.
