After being briefly dethroned by Ripple last spring, Ethereum has since reclaimed its position as the second largest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. This can be partly attributed to Ripple’s price currently being in a freefall – it has gone done 19.2 percent in the last day. Ethereum, on the other hand, has had its price move up 6.9 percent which made getting back to its runners-up spot rather easy.
Ripple sudden price drop can be blamed on CoinMarketCap’s decision that involved the quiet removal of several cryptocurrencies at Korean exchanges from the total average. Among the cryptocurrencies that were affected were XRP, ETH, and BTC. Cryptocurrency prices at Korean exchanges usually vary significantly from their prices in other parts of the world and thus the decision to remove them from the total average resulted in an instant drop in Ripple’s market cap by about 20 billion.
Bitcoin and Ethereum were not affected as much as Ripple was simply because the volumes of these cryptocurrencies that are treated at the Korean exchange are significantly smaller than the large volumes of XRP traded in Korea. Ethereum’s current price stands at a whopping $1, 197 with a market cap of $116 billion. On Monday, however, it reached a record high of $1,261 before retreating to the current $1,197.5 value.
The cryptocurrencies recently bull run has caught the eye of quite a number of people in the crypto and business worlds. Ethereum’s price reached $440 for the first time towards the end of 2017 after which it surpassed the $800 mark in December 2017. By January 2018, 1 ETH had shot up to over $1,000.
Ethereum’s price bump could be a result of the recent launch of a test network for a huge upgrade of the Ethereum protocol that will introduce new ways in how the network formulates consensus – this has been dubbed ‘Casper.’ The Ethereum team also recently launched two subsidy schemes intended to encourage third-party developers to work with the crypto platform in order to solve existing scalability issues.
Furthermore, being the largest platform for initial coin offerings (ICOs) Ethereum is always under the scrutiny of the interested parties and various stakeholders – startups managed to collect billions of dollars in 2017 via ICOs and more of these startups are cropping every day.
