We’ve been making quite the stir about bitcoin lately, but the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market cap – Ethereum (ETH) – has done rather well for itself, too.
Ethereum Is Number Two… And Gaining
While ETH is nowhere near the price of bitcoin (and probably never will be), it’s easy to focus all of one’s attention of the globe’s primary digital asset while pushing all others to the side. At the time of writing, Ethereum is up to roughly $143 – a price spike of nearly four percent over the last 24 hours.
Last month, the currency underwent what’s known as the Istanbul update, and many experts believe Ethereum will prove far more scalable in the long run. This is big news, especially considering the co-founder of the currency – Vitalik Buterin – recently commented that the Ethereum blockchain was no longer scalable due to the amount of congestion and traffic it was facing.
Ethereum has long been sought after for its abilities with smart contracts. As a result, it gives rise to many new tokens, along with many of the industry’s leading decentralized applications (dApps). However, this has taken something of a negative turn in that the blockchain has far too much activity going at once. Thus, Ethereum users have been subjected to slow transaction times and high gas fees.
The Istanbul update brought about six unique changes to the Ethereum blockchain, one being the lowering of gas prices.
In addition, consulting firm Ernst & Young also released a new Ethereum-based tool last month known as Nightfall. The system seeks to fix many of the problems associated with public blockchains, including lessened confidentiality.
Company blockchain lead Paul Brody comments:
Even before this announcement, we’ve seen a huge shift in interest by Fortune 500 companies towards public blockchains. I’ve been particularly astonished by how many of our clients tell us they already know about Zero Knowledge Proofs when we start talking about how we can make public blockchains safe from a privacy and security perspective… It takes six to nine months to go from tools and components… into production [but] you’ll see things from us sooner as we’ve known what was coming for some time.
Many Coins Seem To Be Doing Well
In the meantime, Ethereum is joined by several other leading cryptocurrencies which all seem to be enjoying strolls through green territory. At press time, bitcoin cash (BCH) is up nearly three percent over the past day and is now trading for over $240, while Litecoin (LTC), EOS (EOS) and Binance Coin (BNB) are all enjoying spikes of one to three percent.
Other top 20 cryptocurrencies, however, seem to be running short of luck. Recently, we reported that Ripple’s XRP had incurred an 11 percent spike, but now the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap appears to be falling south, having incurred a near-three percent drop over the past day.