Cryptocurrency Market Continues Recovery as Ethereum Records 15% Gain
The cryptocurrency market has continued to recover at a rapid rate over the past 24 hours, as several major cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum recorded major gains.
Ethereum's Massive Gain
In particular, Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, demonstrated a staggering 15 percent increase in price overnight, from around $1,100 to $1,235. The recent surge in the price of Ether can be attributed to the progress the Ethereum open-source development community has led in scaling the network.
As shown by Etherscan, the Ethereum network is processing more than a million transactions per day. At its peak, the Ethereum network settled over 1.4 million transactions within 24 hours, demonstrating a daily transaction volume that is seven times larger than that of the Bitcoin network.
The increase in the daily transaction volume of the Ethereum network reflects the exponential growth rate of decentralized applications launched on top of the Ethereum protocol. Applications like EtherDelta, 0x, Radar Relay, and CryptoCribs have gained a significant amount of active users over the past few months.
This week, $1.6 billion cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong praised CryptoCribs, a decentralized Ethereum-based Airbnb-like platform with a non-ICO model. In the cryptocurrency industry, it is difficult to find commercially successful decentralized applications that had not conducted initial coin offerings (ICOs), because ICO has become an easy cash grab for developers.
In July of 2017, Aragon co-founder Luis Cuenda stated that he does not know any Ethereum developer who is not a millionaire yet due to the ICO market.
"I don't know any good Ethereum developer that isn't a millionaire — There's a gold rush among developers to learn the coding language of money," Cuende stated.
As Cuende noted, evidently, there is a gold rush amongst developers, venture capitals, large conglomerates, and large-scale investors to dive into the Ethereum market. The demand for ICOs have increased to a point in which blockchain startups have stopped launching public ICOs. Today, only whitelisted investors and institutional investors can invest in most ICOs.
Additionally, as the scalability of the Ethereum network continues to improve through innovative solutions like Sharding and Plasma, Ethereum will be able to provide a better infrastructure and ecosystem for decentralized applications.
The price and the market valuation of Ethereum solely depend on the performance and adoption of decentralized applications launched on the Ethereum protocol. If decentralized applications continue to perform well, the price of Ether will reflect the success of decentralized applications.
Trend of the Market
While the cryptocurrency market has demonstrated optimistic signs of short-term recovery over the past week, it is still down $240 billion from its monthly peak at $820 billion. At $586 billion, major cryptocurrencies in the global market such as bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, and Cardano will have to record massive gains in the upcoming weeks to bring the market to its previous highs.
But, cryptocurrencies like Ripple and Bitcoin Cash are down by more than 50 percent from their all-time highs and the with the exception of bitcoin and Ethereum, most major cryptocurrenices have not performed well.
Based on a variety of factors such as the entrance of institutional investors through bitcoin futures and the adoption of cryptocurrencies by large-scale financial firms including Robinhood, analysts remain enthusiastic regarding the short-term growth trend of the cryptocurrency market.
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