Etherem reaches third place in digital currency market capitalization ranking

Rage Review : Ethereum's price has continued to grow in the past two weeks, which should be due to the disclosure of a series of related cooperation information. It has actually entered the second place in the total market value ranking of digital currencies (Ripple can modify the total amount at will, so its market value has no reference value). Of course, this itself does not mean anything. There have been many digital currencies that have reached or approached this ranking, but as time goes by, we still need to review its actual value. Of course, Ethereum has made a very good start at the moment, but it is still relatively small compared to the relatively large ecosystem of Bitcoin. However, its positioning as a basic platform for blockchain technology has been recognized by many people and financial institutions. Let us wait and see its future development.

Translation: Prince Gong

Ethereum, a Turing-complete digital currency, has been striving to become the first in digital currency capitalization. In this week's digital currency market capitalization ranking, it has surpassed Litecoin to reach the third place, reaching a market capitalization of $138 million on coinmarketcap.com.

In the past few months, Ethereum has been actively promoted in the digital currency industry in terms of development, investment and media. The built-in Turing-complete programming language is built into the Ethereum blockchain as a protocol layer, which can be used by developers and investors. This system is believed to be able to build its own autonomous organizations, smart contracts and applications in enterprises and ordinary people. The current circulation of Ethereum is 76,471,765, each worth about $1.8 at the time of reporting, and the price is still increasing.

Recently, high-tech giant Microsoft announced that they used Ethereum as the basis for its Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) cloud service deployed on its cloud platform Azure earlier last year. Microsoft has also selected other distributed ledger services for research and development, including Ripple, Emercoin, Factom and others. On January 20 of this year, R3 CEV, a blockchain infrastructure project backed by 42 of the world's largest banks, announced that it would use Ethereum and Microsoft Azure. According to reports, R3 is currently linking 11 financial institutions to test distributed ledger technology. These banks include. Brad Novak, technical director of Barclays Investment Bank, explained that the Ethereum protocol is very famous:

“Ethereum is a very well-known open source technology in this space, and we also look forward to collaborative experiments using other technologies.”

Since the announcement of Microsoft Azure and the recent R3, the price of Ethereum has seen a significant increase. In January 2016, the transaction volume began to increase, with an increase of about 20%. However, not everyone is optimistic about the Ethereum train, as there will be more competitors in the future, including Rootstock, Tau Chain, Maidsafe, Counterparty, Bitshares, Coinprism, etc. Despite this, the Ethereum community has gained huge support for development, and many projects have begun to use the Ethereum protocol.

At last year's Devcoin1 (Developer Conference), many teams with innovative concepts have emerged, such as Slock.it. Stephan Tual, founder of Slock.it, explained how to use the Ethereum protocol to implement IoT use cases. In Devcoin1, this device allows a simple home door handle to open and close the door online. In the summer of 2015, as the discussion of Ethereum became more heated, unknown sources said that BNP Paribas, Barclays and UBS intended to use Ethereum for test projects.

There are already some people in the digital currency community saying that Ethereum may replace Bitcoin, especially since it has become the third largest digital currency by market capitalization. However, if it wants to approach Bitcoin's $5.8 billion market capitalization, it still has a long way to go, and it needs thousands of merchants, devices and software applications to achieve such a network effect. Coincidentally, Dash and Ethereum also saw a surge in price after Mike Hearns announced that he believed the Bitcoin protocol had failed and was preparing to join the R3 team.

Bitcoin prices have recovered from the drop caused by Hearn's statement, and Ethereum prices have risen further. Will Ethereum be a competitor to Bitcoin or a supplement to the current king of digital currencies? Only time will tell, depending on whether having a Turing-complete programming language system can play a role in digital currencies, the Internet of Things, and many financial process scenarios.