Ether Sets a New Daily Transactions Record

There have been few dull moments in the cryptocurrency space so far in 2017. This year we’ve witnessed rising prices, surging market capitalizations, new alliances and the growing trend of initial coin offerings (ICOs).

Launched in 2015, Ethereum is a decentralized software platform that enables SmartContracts and Distributed Applications (ĐApps) to be built and run without any downtime, fraud, control or interference from a third party. It is not just a platform, but also a programming language (Turing complete) running on a blockchain, helping developers to build and publish distributed applications. The potential uses of Ethereum are numerous. (See also: Are There SEC Guidelines on ICOs?)

Some of the most popular projects doing ICOs in recent times are being built on Ethereum. The crypto-fuel Ether has risen from about $8 at the beginning of 2017 to $300 levels. It touched an all-time high in June, crossing $400.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, tweeted on August 15 that ETH daily transactions touched an all-time high.

According to BitInfoCharts, the number of ETH transactions in the last 24 hours was 414,054. Ether’s total daily transactions was just 43,000 at the start of 2017—which means the number of transactions per day is almost ten times what it used to be. The number of Bitcoin daily transactions is 274,736. Bitcoin daily transactions peaked around the 368,000-370,000 levels in May this year, and Ether’s daily transactions have crossed those of bitcoin by a neat margin. The transactions with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) were 135,552, while those with Ethereum classic (ETC) were 33,456.

Comparing Bitcoin and Ether is almost unavoidable, even though they differ in purpose. While Bitcoin is created as an alternative to regular money and is thus a medium of payment transaction and store of value, Ethereum is developed as a platform which facilitates peer-to-peer contracts and applications via its own currency vehicle. While Bitcoin and Ether are both digital currencies, the primary purpose of Ether is not to establish itself as a payment alternative, but to facilitate and monetize the working of Ethereum to enable developers to build and run distributed applications (ĐApps).

In terms of market capitalization, Ethereum with its current price of around $300 has a market capitalization of $28.53 billion, which is about a fifth of the overall cryptocurrency market capitalization of $141.65 billion. Bitcoin is currently trading comfortably around the $4300 levels with its market capitalization at $71 billion.

Ethereum is also getting set for scaling infrastructure known as Plasma. According to the paper written by Buterin and Lightning Network researcher Joseph Poon, “Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide.” (See also: What is Plasma and How Will It Strengthen the Ethereum Blockchain?)