In the weeks preceding the release of the Ethereum’s production-ready software implementation ‘Homestead’, the next-generation blockchain project has seen a sharp increase interest from the digital currency community.
According to figures from industry data source Coinmarketcap, the market cap for ether (ETH), the platform’s publicly traded token, has risen to more than $1bn at press time, up from $768m on 7th March. During this time, the value of ETH has climbed to $13.55 across exchanges, rising from $9.92 one week prior.
Still, the value is a far cry from the $2.50 observed on 7th August, 2015, when digital currency exchange Kraken announced it would be the first major venture-backed business to offering ether trading pairs. Some 5,000 ETH were traded over the course of the first day.
At the time of Kraken’s announcement, Bitfinex indicated it was "not considering" support for ETH trading, but that it would potentially add the coin should it become more widely traded. However, Bitfinex officially added trading on 12th March.
Bitfinex director of community Zane Tackett indicated that it began to consider adding ether trading pairs in late February, and that it was spurred on by the fact that the exchange had previously taken steps to support ether on its API and trading engine.
Tackett told CoinDesk: "You can definitely see there’s a demand there for trading Ethereum. We couldn’t really miss what was happening with the volume. That was a large basis for our decision. It’s higher than any other [alternative digital currency] has ever gotten." During the first five hours of trading, Bitfinex had already processed more than 44,200 or nearly $600,000 in volume for its ETH/USD and ETH/BTC trading pairs.
By contrast, Poloniex, the largest ethereum exchange, was reporting 2.6m ETH traded, or about $35m in total volume .
The decision further comes in anticipation of the release […]
