Since the last month of spring 2017, ethereum’s price had been varying from $200 to $400 per unit. However, within the previous months “the little brother” of bitcoin has demonstrated a steady growth, breaking a new record on January 2 at around 2 AM UTC, being traded at $913.10.
Interestingly, the same day Ethereum Foundation announced that it is ready to grant up to $1 million per research in order to solve scalability problem in the blockchain technology, launching two research programs.
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Ether’s Triumph
Within the past month, ethereum has displayed a 100%-increase. Just on December 1 one, ETH was worth about $440, when at the moment of writing its price is at $889 per unit. At the same time, ethereum’s total market capitalization skyrocketed to $87.8 billion on January 3 from around $72 billion which was the rate for just January 1. It is indeed extraordinary as a year ago the ether’s total market cap was $698 million. That’s a 12,000% increase! It is also notable that on January 1, 2017, ethereum cost only $8.
Even though ether is no longer the second most significant digital coin (recently the fast-forwarding Ripple usurped ether’s place), it still has a lot of potentials. According to the Cointelegraph, ethereum has recently grown against the background that its increasing trading volumes, particularly in Asia.
Currently, the whole cryptocurrency market is living through the successful growth. Within the past 24 hours, the total crypto market cap has grown from $585.6 billion to $700.5 billion.
Buterin’s Plans
Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain-based platform, in his blog on January 2 revealed two programs, which his uncommercial organization is ready to sponsor in order to explore the possible ways of solving blockchain scalability issue.
Buterin suggested two solutions to the problem: layer-two protocols and sharding. If the first one is an attitude by which operations are supposed to be taken off the main blockchain to be processed, then the second one is a process which suggests only a little number of nods on the blockchain for verifying a transaction.
Those, who are ready to research one of these programs, will receive a subsidy of $50,000-$1 million. The Ethereum Foundation is looking forward to meeting students, developers and firms which would like to launch the protocols on ether’s principal net after the research is completed.
It seems that Buterin wants to have a hand in the most revolutionizing changes in the blockchain technology, so if he succeeds, ether may get all the chances to skyrocket in the nearby future.
Chart Source: coinmarketcap.com
