Ethereum continues to surge, now worth more than 99% of NASDAQ companies
As a result of Ether’s recent price action, Vitalik Buterin has become the second youngest crypto billionaire in the world.
- Over the last 24 hours, ETH scaled up to a peak of $4,163
- Experts believe ETH’s value may scale up even more after the much awaited London Hard Fork goes live this summer
- Ethereum is now worth more than 99% of the 3,300 publicly listed companies on the NASDAQ
Ether, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalization, has continued to garner an increasing amount of monetary traction. After a new all-time high of $4,163, the price of a single token is currently sitting at $4,109.
To make sense of Ether’s ongoing price action, Finder spoke with Sebastian Bürgel, cofounder of ETH-based privacy protocol HOPR. In his view, ETH reaching new all-time high values every other day is really just a long overdue correction reflecting the years of hard work that have been poured into the Ethereum ecosystem, adding:
“During the ICO mania in 2017/18 we saw a lot of unwarranted ERC-20 hype, but the 4 years since have delivered a ton of genuine innovation, of which DeFi is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m certain that Ethereum will profoundly change how the global economy works, and this is much bigger than recent price or gas price spikes.”
He further highlighted that the current price rise doesn’t even directly take into account some of the most profound changes that are yet to come to the platform, like summer’s London Hard Fork, which contains the highly awaited EIP1559 fee adjustment and burn mechanisms. “Hopefully the big merge of today’s ETH 1.x into the proof-of-stake ETH2 are the biggest changes to Ethereum since the Genesis block in 2015 and I am very optimistic about them,” he added.
Vitalik becomes latest addition to the billionaire club
Born in 1994, Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian tech savant and co-creator of Ethereum, recently became the second youngest cryptocurrency billionaire ever after Austin Russell, the cofounder and CEO of autonomous vehicle sensor and software company Luminar, whose net worth is currently touted to be around $2.6 billion.
The development came after Ether breached the all important $3,000 threshold. In this regard, it bears mentioning that a wallet address that Buterin publicly shared back in 2018 — claiming to contain all of his Ether holdings — is now worth more than $1 billion.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner’s guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing
Picture: Finder
