There is a race going on today between two cryptocurrencies for second place in the market capacity charts. Ripple and Ethereum are both vying for the spot just behind Bitcoin, the two altcoins have posted strong gains during the Asian trading session today.
Recently knocked off its second spot is Ethereum which has also seen gains of 14% in the past 24 hours. It broke over $900 (on some exchanges) a few hours ago and reached a new high of $914 according to CoinMarketCap.com. ETH is still holding at $880, a rise of 90% from its trading level of $465 at the beginning of December. Ethereum has a current market capacity of $85 billion which puts it just behind Ripple at the time of writing.
Ethereum suffers a similar fate to Bitcoin where the network slows under heavy demand meaning transactions can be painfully slow. The roadmap for Ether includes an update called Casper which will solve some of these scalability issues and upgrade the blockchain. The idea is to bring Ethereum to the point where it can handle as many transactions per second as the Visa network. The initial test network for Casper has just been released which is why the price of ETH is hitting new records at the moment.
The race for second spot is likely to heat up in the next 24 hours as both altcoins continue upwards. Which one is your money on?
Source: newsBTC