Ethereum Surges Past $900, Gets Million Dollar Grant for Scaling Research
One of the major altcoins that are causing a lot of buzz in the crypto markets is Ethereum. The cryptocurrency started its journey of a major upswing in last month of Dec. 2017, and now it has clinched a new milestone while hitting a new all-time high of $956.56, as per our data. The existing market cap of Ethereum stands at US $89.9 billion.
As Ethereum and Ripple continue to rally and post news highs, the two cryptocurrencies have managed to pull the overall market cap above $700 billion and are showing significant strength currently. This highlights the fact that unlike earlier, the cryptocurrency market is not solely dependent on the momentum of Bitcoin. In fact, the dominance of Bitcoin has reduced by greater percentage as the altcoins take the charge.
Just like Ripple, there is a strong demand for Ether tokens among the South Korean investor community which has pulled the cryptocurrency valuation to new highs. Ether is currently trading at a premium in South Korea with the price on the Bithumb exchange showing above $1116 with more than $300 million daily trading volumes.
Also, another news that could have possibly triggered the rally of Ether tokens is that the Ethereum Foundation has received a huge sum in grant for research purpose to improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain.
In his latest blog published this Tuesday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed that the Ethereum blockchain has reached 1 million transactions daily. He further writes that one of the major challenges that lie ahead is solving the scalability issues of the network and developers have to work enough to create and successfully run a DAPP (decentralized applications) ecosystem.
The total grant received will be divided to provide a subsidy to the development of two projects. One is the implementation of the sharding protocol wherein only a few nodes will be required to verify the transaction instead of each node doing it. This will reduce the burden on the network and facilitate faster transactions.
The other one is the development of a second-layer over the Ethereum blockchain wherein transactions could be moved and processed off the blockchain. Each of these projects is expected to receive a grant of somewhere between $50,000-$1 million.
In order to solve and work on this scalability issue, Vitalik Buterin has also invited third-party developers to work in a team. He wrote: “Independent teams of developers, companies and university and academic groups are all welcome to apply; we recognize that different types of applicants may require different formats and processes and we are willing to be flexible to accommodate individual teams’ needs.”