Ethereum surges at record, ready to the Flippening?

8 years ago - Published in Finance, Fintech Land, Technical Analysis

Relative to Bitcoin, Ethereum was an unknown cryptocurrency. Now, it’s reaching record highs after Russian President Vladimir Putin met with its founder. A new cryptocurrency called Ethereum reached another record high, driven by the potentials of the blockchain technology and supports from Russia, Singapore, and Japan.

Ethereum is now up over 5,000 percent since the beginning of this year. On Monday, its price hit $407.10, this was a record level which marked a more than 5,001 per cent rise in price since 1 January when ethereum was trading at $7.98.

The surge in the trading value of Ethereum can be attributed to a number of factors, including a recent visit by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Buterin’s meeting with Putin during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum suggest Russian’s interest in using digital currency to improve its economy.

“The digital economy isn’t a separate industry, it’s essentially the foundation for creating brand new business models,” Putin said during the forum, Bloomberg reported.

It has “almost five times as many nodes in its network as bitcoin, meaning more people are using their computers to support it,” a Motherboard report notes. Ethereum also has more transactions per day, the report adds.

Ether is the name of the cryptocurrency running on the ethereum blockchain, which was the technology that underpinned the digital coin. However, ethereum was also used as shorthand for the digital currency.

Meanwhile, digital currency exchange Coinbase said yesterday it was experiencing an outage due to an increase in traffic and trading volume.

Coinbase, among the world's largest digital currency companies, with operations across 32 countries, said in a statement to Reuters that its engineers and support teams had been working to keep up with the volume.

With demand for crypto-assets soaring with the creation of new funding for start-ups using blockchain technology, the market capitalisation of digital currencies had increased by around 95 per cent to $106 billion over the past month.