Ethereum’s Market Cap Takes Second Spot, Beats Ripple

Ethereum’s market cap jumped from third position to second within a day and it has now become the second biggest cryptocurrency, Finance Magnates reported. According to latest data received from Coinmarketcap, Ethereum’s market cap stands at $200,087,112, beating Ripple that is somewhat stagnant at $173 million (at the time of writing).

P Bart Stephens, Managing Partner of Blockchain Capital, tweeted “@ethereumproject Congratulations to @VitalikButerin and the Ethereum ecosystem. Ether now the second largest Blockchain platform”.

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference, according to the website. Ether is the internal 'fuel' – the currency unit – of Ethereum, used to pay for computational services on the network. 

In an interview on TheProtocol.TV, Vitalik Buterin, founder and chief scientist of the Ethereum project said, “You can think of it as..sort of like a decentralized computing environment that can be used to simulate a currency, can be used to simulate a domain name registration, can be used to simulate financial contracts… It is literally programmable money in a way that bitcoin tried to be but isn’t”.