It seems now like every day Ethereum sets another record, leaving most other Cryptocurrencies in its dust. Yesterday we reported that Ether's market capitalization reached $283 million, overtaking Ripple as the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap and now it is already at $367 million - 37% bigger than Ripple.
The price of Ether completed an astonishing 100% rise in the past week, jumping about 40% in the last twenty-four hours alone to above 0.0126 BTC ($4.78). Putting this into perspective, the price of bitcoin remained stuck at around $375 for the past two weeks after falling from as high as $465 just in January 2016. For Ethereum to reach bitcoin's market cap of $5.75 billion it still has plenty of room to grow but it's not certain that the network would really benefit from a strong Ether if its purpose is to become a utility and not a storage of wealth.
Supporting the rise of Ether’s price were exceptionally large trading volumes for any cryptocurrency, about $26.1 million in the last twenty-four hours – over a third of bitcoin’s daily trading volume ($62.5m ADV). Considering that bitcoin's trading volumes also jumped compared with the previous couple of days it is safe to assume that the growth in its trading was actually traders switching from BTC to ETH.
Giving an indication of the massive trading volumes, Erik Voorhees, the creator of cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift.io, released this statement on an Ethereum forum: "We had a whirlwind day today at ShapeShift. Over $500,000 worth of BTC/ETH trades in the past 24 hours. This blows away our previous daily volume record. We'll continue working to make it as easy as possible for all Blockchain assets to be convertible with Ethereum,...and look forward to some more advanced Ethereum functionality....We're bullish on the Ethereum ecosystem."
