Bitcoin jumped to $6,428.13 as of writing this article breaking the $6,350 and $6375 resistance levels. But it isn’t just Bitcoin that experienced an increase. Ethereum is also on the rise. Vitalik Buterin who is the founder of Ethereum announced in the Czech Republic during a crypto conference that there will be a major upgrade in the system even dubbing it as “Ethereum 2.0” or serenity.
According to Buterin, there will be the implementation of Casper. The Casper update will be able to solve problems that have been encountered by Ethereum by switching from PoW protocol to PoS. He mentioned that the “Launch is basically the milestone that we’ve all been waiting for”.
The updated version is most likely going to solve the scalability issues in the cryptocurrency. Since the update, Ethereum jumped by 4% in the last 24 hours. Since the last week, it has jumped by 8%. It was trading at $210 yesterday.
15 Transactions Per Second
Right now, Ethereum currently handles around 15 transactions per second. This could be improved via proof-of-stake. Currently, Ethereum has the proof-of-work algorithm. This is an algorithm that is known to be computing power-intensive. And also, it becomes worse as the system develops. With the new system. it only means that the more tokens that a node owns, the more likely it is going to win the race to verify the next block.
So when exactly is the change happening? Buterin wasn’t exactly specific when this is going ot happen. He said that “Launch is basically the milestone that we’ve all been waiting for, that we’ve been working toward for the last four to five years, and a milestone which is really no longer so far away”.
JP Morgan and Ethereum?
This isn’t the only development with Ethereum. In fact, during the beginning of the week, JP Morgan announced that there will be an enterprise version of the Ethereum blockchain that will be called Quorum. It allows smart contracts. According to JP Morgan head of blockchain initiatives Umar Farooq, “We are big believers in Ethereum”. He also added that “There are people outside our firm using Quorum to tokenise gold, for instance. They wrap a gold bar into a tamper-proof case electronically tagged, and they can track the gold bar from mine to end point—with the use case being if you know it’s socially responsible mine, someone will be willing to pay a higher spread on that gold versus if you don’t know where it comes from. Diamond is another example”.
This is quite a surprise considering Jamie Dimon who works as the chief executive of JP Morgan called Bitcoin as a fraud in 2017 but praised blockchain technology.
And also, there’s Commonwealth Bank that issued a bond for the World Bank using a blockchain that was created via the Ethereum code.
There were a lot of developments in Ethereum that could potentially lead to a positive price forecast especially in the coming months. But since there really is no date mentioned by Buterin when the new algorithm is going to launch, we all just have to wait and see.
