Ethereum’s Market Cap Eyes Second spot

Ethereum has been going strong and has finally taken the third spot in terms of market cap, according to latest figures obtained from Coinmarketcap.

However, the news doesn’t come as a surprise. Ethereum’s market cap stands at $159,793,354 and follows Ripple at $173,591,466 (at the time of writing). Given the fast growth rate, Ethereum will soon take the second spot.

According to data from Ethernodes.org, the total number of ether nodes stand at 1832, significantly up from 1679, since we last reported it.

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.

Recently, R3 and 11 member banks of the blockchain consortium successfully completed a landmark distributed ledger experiment. The banks were connected on an R3-managed private P2P distributed ledger, based on Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) in an accelerated development environment.

“Ethereum is a well-known open source technology in this space and we also look forward to collaborative experiments using other technologies”, said Brad Novak, Chief Technology Officer for the Investment Bank at Barclays.

The participating banks successfully executed financial transactions instantaneously across the global private network. They simulated exchanging value, represented by tokenized assets on the distributed ledger without the need for a centralized third party.