Ethereum (ETH) has once again surpassed Ripple to become the second largest currency by market cap. According to latest data received from Coinmarketcap, Ethereum’s market cap stands at $341,984,494, significant larger than Ripple $266,559,698 million (at the time of writing). Ethereum’s market cap exceeded Ripple’s for the first time towards the end of last month.

Moreover, there has been a recent surge in ETH price. After hovering below $1 for quite some time, it started moving north last month, breaking above $2. This week, the price has moved beyond the $4 mark and currently trades at $4.42 at press time.

Finance Magnates noted that supporting the surge in Ether’s price was its large trading volumes – about $21.2 million in the last twenty-four hours.

Erik Voorhees, the creator of cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift.io, released this statement:

“We had a whirlwind day today at ShapeShift. Over $500,000 worth of BTC/ETH trades in the past 24 hours. This blows away our previous daily volume record. We’ll continue working to make it as easy as possible for all blockchain assets to be convertible with Ethereum via web or API. We're working on improving contract support, and look forward to some more advanced Ethereum functionality. We’re bullish on the Ethereum ecosystem.”

The number of Ethereum nodes has also been growing steadily. According to statistics obtained by Ethernodes.org, total ether nodes stand at 2617, much higher than 1679 nodes, reported by us on January 19.

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.