There is a lot of good news for Ethereum being released lately, with the upcoming Homestead release and announcement on the Microsoft’s Azure blog of the addition of BlockApps:STRATO to its Azure’s Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) product line.
BlockApps is a startup providing Ethereum block-chain software for enterprises, and its STRATO offering is a single-node blockchain instance, which acts as a developer sandbox for testing Ethereum blockchain applications.
The Microsoft blog post also announced the addition of asset exchange provider AlphaPoint and Internet-of-Things micro-payments startup IOTA to its Azure BaaS platform as well.
It seems the market reaction to all this news is positive, as Ethereum just passed it’s previous ATH (All-Time-High) of $6.47 ETH/USD set on February 12, 2106. Currently trading above $7.50 at press time, on both Kraken and Poloniex, it seems investors are a bit more optimistic now that developer milestones are being reached and industry names are interested in the technology.
UPDATE:
Since this article was published a few days ago, Ethereum has continued it dramatic rise and reached as high as $12.30 on Poloniex before dropping back down a bit into the $11 range. Directly related to the massive upswing in trading price, is the calculated market-cap of Ethereum as it approached the $1 billion dollar mark.
As pointed out in my Coinmarketcap article previously, while this does not mean that $1 billion dollars have actually exchanged hands for Eth, it is simply a measure if all the coins currently in circulation would (could) be sold at the current exchange rate, what that value would amount to. It is useful for relative comparisons between other cryptocurrencies and has drawn a lot of excitement recently as it is closing in on Bitcoin’s 6 billion dollar market cap figure.
Currently secure in their first and second place positions in the market cap rankings, Bitcoin and Ethereum both look to be Billion dollar powerhouses in the Cyptocurrency world.
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