As the second most valuable cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, Ethereum reached its highest exchange rate of the year in late June, when it briefly traded close to $340; since that uptick in trading volume, ETH/USD plunged all the way down to $167 in late August before going on a rally that pushed it to $215 within two weeks. To a certain extent, Ethereum has been doing better than Bitcoin in some exchange platforms; on September 18, for example, it soared by more than 10 percent while BTC/USD dropped below its $10,000 support level.
Recent news reports suggest that Ethereum is once again catching the attention of investors. First of all, leading digital payments platform BitPay announced that it would soon upgrade its systems to accept ETH. This announcement feels a bit surprising because this cryptocurrency has been around for a few years, but the Ethereum blockchain was not initially developed to support financial tokens. Second, the volume of daily ETH transaction fees has recently been higher than BTC, thus indicating that overall demand is increasing.
Ethereum Stands Out from the Field of Alt-Coins
While Ethereum is often lumped together with the rest of the "alt-coins," meaning that it emerged in the wake of Bitcoin, it should be noted that its underlying blockchain is the most widely used around the world. The ETH token, which is actually known as Ether, does not circulate as widely as other tokens supported by the Ethereum blockchain, and this puts it in a similar category as Bitcoin, meaning that investors treat it as a digital asset more than as a currency.
Vitalik Buterin, one of the core Ethereum developers, has previously mentioned that digital currencies are not among his main priorities; he prefers his blockchain projects to be implemented in the fields of advanced computing, but he was pleased to learn that BitPay is preparing to process ETH payments. Moreover, Buterin has also mentioned that he may work with Facebook to develop Project Libra, which would become a de facto digital currency for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp users.
One more factor contributing to renewed interest in ETH is the future development of Ethereum 2.0, a new blockchain and distributed ledger network that is rumored to be a considerable improvement over its original. With the original Bitcoin blockchain stagnating, the prospect of Ethereum 2.0 supporting the digital currencies of the future is something that investors are clearly excited about.