Ether is the indigenous cryptocurrency of the vastly flourishing Ethereum network. The price of ether, Ethereum's token, has hit an all new height of $415 on the 23rd of November.
This new gain has earned Ethereum the second highest slot on the market evaluation chart of digital currencies at $40 billion, being only second to bitcoin and bitcoin cash.
The US and South Korean markets are the most interested in Ehtereum, with a majority of the ethers traded from these two countries. In fact, South Korea’s Bithumb, the largest cryptoworld trader and exchanger, comprises 15% of Ethereum’s total exchanges over the last 24 hours. Even though bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to be commercially viable, ether currently has the most amount of transactions on a daily basis. To be exact, 52% of the cryptocurrency market transactions are performed by the Ethereum network on average.
After the creation of Bitcoin in 2009, several alternative currencies have been made. These altcoins include Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Monero. Many have enjoyed similar successes as ether. It is no secret that the cryptocurrency market trend is being represented by the triumph of Ethereum.
The Ethereum network has taken the leading position since the Byzantium hard fork. After this fork, the network started performing more transactions than the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin's network is currently suffering due to a rise in the transaction costs of the Bitcoin network, as explained by Donald Mclntyre, the cheif operater of Etherplan and an Ethereum analyst.
Blockchain, the second largest wallet platform, has announced that it will be integrating segwit in early 2018. This integration will decrease the transaction costs by up to 35%, as reported by CNN.
The future of Ethereum is nothing but bright considering the following factors:
- Progress of Plasma and Sharding scaling projects.
- The formulation of cryptographic systems like ZK-SNARKs.
- Network unsteadiness of other blockchain networks as Bitcoin Cash
- Strongly bound amalgamation amongst EEA coterie, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
Considering the amount of time Ethereum has been in existence, its progress has been truly remarkable. The meteoric rise in its price and acceptance represents the overall greater interest of public in cryptocurrencies. Ethereum shows potential to capture the whole crypto market and become the dominant player in the cryptocurrency sector.