After numerous altcoins reached new all-time highs in recent days, Ethereum has also picked up pace, breaking the $1,000 mark early this morning around 6 AM. The third-largest cryptocurrency is therefore starting the new year on a bullish note.
The massive gains in Bitcoin last year could not be sustained at the same rate after the launch of Bitcoin futures on the CME on December 18, 2017. Still, the Bitcoin price remains at a very high level: comparing today’s value (around €13,300) with January of the previous year (€770) shows how much it has risen.
Ethereum launched a new rally yesterday and reached another all-time high. Market capitalization topped $100 billion, and the psychological $1,000 threshold was surpassed for the first time. Currently, the Ethereum price stands at just under €827 per token, which is more than €800 higher than in January 2017.
This dizzying price increase illustrates how much potential we see in Ethereum. One of the most important upgrades for the Ethereum blockchain—the activation of Plasma—has not yet been implemented and could have further positive effects on the price in the future.
The Plasma update is designed to enable thousands of transactions per second, addressing the scalability issues Ethereum has faced in the past. With Plasma, the network will be able to process much larger volumes of data and significantly improve transaction speed.
IOTA announces partnership with ITIC
The IOTA Foundation announced on its official blog that Joachim Taiber has been secured as a new official partner with the International Transportation Innovation Center (ITIC) for future collaboration.
The joint project will expand work on autonomous vehicles within a “Smart City” framework. IOTA’s technology is intended to help determine, in a pilot project, which conditions must be met for autonomous vehicles to charge themselves completely without human intervention.
A preview of the IOTA Simulation Environment of a decentralized Smart City Charging Network based on IOTA. This environment is able to simulate hundreds of nodes virtually to boost real-world deployment preparations. pic.twitter.com/yIN7vv6DYR
— IOTA (@iotatoken) December 3, 2017
The long-term goal, according to ITIC, is
to create a fully automated and sustainable mobility ecosystem with maximum security through global adoption of intelligent mobility applications based on the open-source protocol and the IOTA Data Marketplace.
With this partnership, IOTA gains another collaborator to test the promising Tangle protocol and Data Marketplace technologies. However, it remains to be seen how and to what extent IOTA’s technology will be adopted in real-world use. The coming months will be interesting to watch and will help shape IOTA’s direction in 2018.
The IOTA price is currently unchanged by the announcement and remains largely sideways at around €3.25.
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