Ethereum Going Strong: Market Cap, Number Of Total Nodes Rise

Amid the whole – Bitcoin has failed…no, it hasn’t – saga, one cryptocurrency seems to be showing tremendous growth and firming its foothold.

Ether, Ethereum’s unit of account, is soon catching up to the second most widely known cryptocurrency – Litecoin. 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.

“Ethereum platform grew out of the realization that blockchains can go far beyond currency, together with a frustration with the limitations of previous projects. The core idea was simple: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language, allowing users to build any kind of applications on top”, writes Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum.

Speaking of market cap, last Thursday, Ethereum stood at $85,849,605 and within just 5 days it grew to $105,176,692, while Litecoin has a market cap of $133,404,563 (at the time of writing). The day is not far when Ethereum will surpass Litecoin.

Moreover, the number of Ethereum nodes has also been growing. According to statistics obtained by Ethernodes.org, total ether nodes stand at 1679 (at the time of writing).

George Hallam, External Relations Director at Ehtereum Project, tweeted on 8 January, “Just 4 months after release, Ethereum already has ~1/4 the number of nodes on the bitcoin network (1354/5712)! #wow”.

Simply put, in a matter of just 10 days, the number of Ethereum nodes has increased more than 300. On the other hand, the growth of bitcoin nodes has been slowing. According to Bitnodes data, the total reachable Bitcoin nodes stand at 5573.

Bitcoinist explains that while the setting up of Bitcoin node is easy, for Ethereum it is quite complex. It says, “Running an Ethereum node on any operating system will require a fair amount of tinkering and scripting although detailed instructions are provided on Gitbooks. Bitcoin, on the other hand, just requires the client to be run on any device, and the right ports to be forward.”

It added that although bitcoin may be leading in terms of total number of nodes, it needs to find new ways to boost its number of nodes very soon.