Whether you are among those who think that Ethereum is the next internet or those that think it's just being pumped by corporations trying to take down Bitcoin , one can not deny the incredibly rapid rise of its value. Ether's overall market capitalization climbed above $600 million for the first time in the last twenty-four hours before the price stabilized a bit around $580 million as of the time of this writing.
Putting things into perspective, only last week Ether's market cap reached around $447 million - more than Ripple and Litecoin combined for the first time with a price of $5.8. And the ETH/USD exchange rate grew more than 33% over the past seven days, including 16% in the last twenty-four hours, bringing the price of Ether to $7.5 right now. Behind the rise are exceptionally large trading volumes also – about $25.7 million in the last twenty-four hours.
Points of interest
On social media bullish ETH traders mainly point to two examples from recent days of how Ethereum is being accepted into the mainstream business world as the reasons for the last price hike. Media giant Thomson Reuters published a wanted ad for a Blockchain expert software engineer specifically mentioning designing for Ethereum.
Screenshot: Thomson Reuters Wants an Ethereum Engineer
Meanwhile Microsoft Azure's 'Blockchain as a Service' has welcomed its first certified offering from Blockapps: STRATO. The offering is a "single-node blockchain instance", which acts as a developer sandbox for testing Ethereum applications and offers an API for connecting applications to private, semi-private and public Ethereum blockchains.
