Ethereum has been on an incredible roll recently but even when we speculated on Monday that it won't be long until Ether overtakes Litecoin we did not expect it happen this fast.
The price of Ethereum’s cryptocurrency increased by an incredible 75% over the past week and jumped about 30% in the last twenty-four hours alone to above 0.0055 BTC ($2.17), taking its market capitalization to around $165 million. Meanwhile, Litecoin has stagnated and its market cap is just around $137 million, ceding the third biggest cryptocurrency by market cap title to Ether.
With the Ripple (XRP) market cap now set at just around $172 million, it seems like just a short matter of time until Ethereum passes it to become the second biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, trailing only Bitcoin itself.
Making the rise of Ethereum's price even more impressive is the large trading volumes behind it - almost ten million dollars ($9.8M ADV) in the last twenty-four hours. The figure is about ten times that of Litecoin's ($1M ADV), thirty times that of Ripple's (0.3M ADV) and a quarter of bitcoin's daily trading volume ($39.5M ADV).
One factor which is likely to have brought more investors and traders' attention to Ether is its recent integration with the mainstream financial system. On Wednesday, R3 CEV announced the completion of a distributed ledger experiment. Eleven of the world’s biggest banks were connected on a managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger, underpinned by Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure.
Brad Novak, Chief Technology Officer for the Investment Bank at Barclays, commented last week: “As we progress our evaluations of shared ledgers and smart contracts, we look forward to leveraging R3’s lab environment for collaborative technology experiments. Ethereum is a well-known open source technology in this space and we also look forward to collaborative experiments using other technologies.”
