After the new rise of the price of ether, the token used on the Ethereum smart contracts platform, its market capitalisation surpassed Ripple and Litecoin combined.

The price of one ether increased 10% in dollar terms, says Finance Magnates, reaching $5.8 (or 0.013 BTC). With its overall market capitalisation of around $447 million, Ethereum is still lagging far behind bitcoin ($6.5 billion) but has cemented its second position in the cryptocurrency space. Ripple occupies the third place at the pedestal ($273 million), followed by Litecoin ($153 million).

The decentralised smart contracts platform created by Vitalik Buterin on the basis of the blockchain technology was launched in July 2015. During the pre-sale of digital tokens used to raise money for the development of the platform 1 ETH was valued at 0.0005 BTC. Many bitcoiners were sceptic about Ethereum: in late 2015, the most popular bet on the bitcoin wager contract platform BitBet was crudely formulated as “The ETH scam won’t see 2016”. However, at this time one ether was already worth 0.004 BTC and since then it has increased threefold.

Indeed, many uses have been found for Ethereum. A number of blockchain companies incorporated it into their structure, starting with ShapeShift in August 2015. Ethereum served as a base for such new cryptocurrencies as Pinkcoin, elCoin and DigixDAO. In Ukraine, the platform is expected to be used as a base for an official electronic voting system. And in November 2015 Ethereum helped an American couple to conclude the first ever marriage contract on blockchain. 

Alexey Tereshchenko