Ether on course to become second biggest digital currency in circulation

The cryptocurrency created by Ethereum, Ether, has now surpassed Litecoin in market cap, after a week in which the value of an Ether increased 75% to $165m; with this move, Ether has now become the third largest digital currency by market cap. Reports also suggest that Ether has a huge positive to it that other digital currencies lack; its trading volumes. The Ethereum network is currently experiencing ten times that of the Litecoin network, and thirty times that of the Ripple network. Reports suggest that this factor, and the positive momentum pushing Ether higher, are likely to contribute to Ether soon overtaking Ripple as the second biggest digital currency in circulation, behind only Bitcoin itself.

Ethereum Ethereum Ethereum is an open source, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality. Created in 2014, Ethereum now stands as the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap at the time of writing.As a decentralized cryptocurrency network and software platform, Ethereum represents the most prominent altcoin. Ethereum also enables the creation Distributed Applications, or dapps. Understanding EthereumEthereum boasts its own programming language, Ethereum is an open source, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality. Created in 2014, Ethereum now stands as the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap at the time of writing.As a decentralized cryptocurrency network and software platform, Ethereum represents the most prominent altcoin. Ethereum also enables the creation Distributed Applications, or dapps. Understanding EthereumEthereum boasts its own programming language, Read this Term has been on an incredible roll recently but even when we speculated on Monday that it won't be long until Ether overtakes Litecoin we did not expect it happen this fast.

The price of Ethereum’s cryptocurrency increased by an incredible 75% over the past week and jumped about 30% in the last twenty-four hours alone to above 0.0055 BTC ($2.17), taking its market capitalization to around $165 million. Meanwhile, Litecoin has stagnated and its market cap is just around $137 million, ceding the third biggest cryptocurrency by market cap title to Ether.

With the Ripple (XRP) market cap now set at just around $172 million, it seems like just a short matter of time until Ethereum passes it to become the second biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, trailing only Bitcoin Bitcoin While some may still be wondering what is Bitcoin, who created Bitcoin, or how does Bitcoin work, one thing is certain: Bitcoin has changed the world.No one can remain indifferent to this revolutionary, decentralized, digital asset nor to its blockchain technology.In fact, we’ve gone a long way ever since a Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz made BTC’s first official commercial transaction with a real company by trading 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 pizzas at his local Papa John’s.One could now argue that While some may still be wondering what is Bitcoin, who created Bitcoin, or how does Bitcoin work, one thing is certain: Bitcoin has changed the world.No one can remain indifferent to this revolutionary, decentralized, digital asset nor to its blockchain technology.In fact, we’ve gone a long way ever since a Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz made BTC’s first official commercial transaction with a real company by trading 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 pizzas at his local Papa John’s.One could now argue that Read this Term itself.

Making the rise of Ethereum's price even more impressive is the large trading volumes behind it - almost ten million dollars ($9.8M ADV) in the last twenty-four hours. The figure is about ten times that of Litecoin's ($1M ADV), thirty times that of Ripple's (0.3M ADV) and a quarter of bitcoin's daily trading volume ($39.5M ADV).

One factor which is likely to have brought more investors and traders' attention to Ether is its recent integration with the mainstream financial system. On Wednesday, R3 CEV announced the completion of a distributed ledger experiment. Eleven of the world’s biggest banks were connected on a managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger, underpinned by Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure.

Brad Novak, Chief Technology Officer for the Investment Bank at Barclays, commented last week: “As we progress our evaluations of shared ledgers and smart contracts, we look forward to leveraging R3’s lab environment for collaborative technology experiments. Ethereum is a well-known open source technology in this space and we also look forward to collaborative experiments using other technologies.”