The Ethereum protocol, described by some in the cryptocurrency community as a new rival or sibling for frontrunner technology Bitcoin, is supported by its 22 year old founder Vitalik Buterin, other co-founders including Toronto Stock Exchange chief digital officer Anthony Di Iorio, and a varied board of special advisors and technical experts who report directly to the Swiss-based Ethereum Foundation. Ethereum also receives input from Roman Mandeleil, who coded the protocol’s Java implementation and comes from a former career at IBM Labs. Mandeleil is the CEO and founder of ether.camp , the protocol’s most popular block and contract explorer. According to ethstats.net , Ethereum is now on block #2,048,841. Unlike Bitcoin’s eventual 21 million coin supply ceiling, there is no hard cap to the amount of Ether that can be created over time, but only 5 Ether per mined block are generated – right now, a new block is mined approximately every 14.4 seconds. Ether is traded on several regulated exchanges in the United States, including Gemini , Bitfinex, and Coinbase GDAX . (Coinbase also recently announced integration of Ether on coinbase.com, the company’s primary consumer wallet platform.) Increased visibility of Ether seems to have attracted the attention of market participants far outside of the usual San Francisco Bitcoin start-up scene, as earlier this evening I was able to confirm a rumor that global financial services company UBS is nearing a formal announcement regarding its acceptance of Ethereum. The Swiss bank plans to work with Ethereum, both as an experimental emerging asset class and as a rail for ferrying various kinds of financial data around the world. A piece published by CryptoCoinsNews reporter Elliot Maras last year detailed a “settlement coin” being built by UBS, and separately, a project within the bank to build a bonds platform atop the […]
