Ethereum (ETH) has been all the rage within the crypto trading community lately with its recent price hitting over 0.017 ETH/BTC, now it has also passed a milestone of another sort. Over one million blocks have now been mined in a little over 6 months since mining officially began.
Since the block times on the Ethereum network are incredibly fast when compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum’s ~15 seconds per block as compared to Bitcoin and its average of 6 minutes per block, the milestone wasn’t hard to reach. For comparison, Bitcoin is just approaching block number 400,000 after more than 5 years of existence.
As a consequence of this rapid block generation, the file size of the Ethereum block-chain data files are also increasing dramatically, they are currently nearing the 8 GB mark. This is about 12% of Bitcoin’s block-chain size, which itself is growing rapidly as it nears 65 GB in size.
Ethereum rewards miners with 5 ETH per block, meaning now over 5 million Ether’s have been mined since its release. This however does not represent the total supply of Ethereum, as 72 million Ether were made available prior the start of the mining. Some of this was distributed by a pre-sale to raise funds for continued development, as well as initial advertising and promotional campaigns. This brings the current total coin supply to around 77 million Ether.
A breakdown of the current Ether in circulation is as follows:
Pre-sale: 60,102,216 ETH
2x pools of 9.9% each: 5,950,119 x 2 = 11,900,238 ETH
Total Supply Pre-Mining: 72,002,454 ETH
The Ether supply will continue to grow with projections of:
Mining/year: 15,626,576*
So based upon the above we can estimate the Ether supply for the foreseeable future as:
(End of) Year 1: 87,629,030 Ether
Year 2: 103,255,606 Ether
Year 3: 118,882,182 Ether
Year 3: 134,508, 758 Ether
…
Year 10: 243,894,790 Ether
Currently Ethereum is being traded for around $5.40 per ETH, bringing its total market capitalization to around $416 million, earning it a second place position right under Bitcoin with its $6 billion market cap. Looking beyond the market cap, the 24 hour trading volumes show Ethereum also doing well with close to $13 million in volume, again second only to bitcoin with its $64 million 24 hour volume.
It looks like Ethereum will be a coin worth watching for 2016, I know I will be.
extremely descriptive write-up, thanks, +3 for writing