Ethereum Gains Wall Street Selling Power As Token Lags Bitcoin
(Bloomberg) — Ethereum was seen as challenging bitcoin’s status as the leading cryptocurrency, and the best place to make blockchain a more valuable technology.
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But as Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies have surged in recent months — thanks to the embrace of President Donald Trump — Ethereum has struggled to keep pace, despite hosting the second most valuable digital token, Ether. In the last year, Bitcoin has increased by almost 160%, while Ether has increased by only 40%.
To help the token and its decentralized network gain some momentum, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation he created are throwing their weight behind a new startup called Ether, the best privacy for Wall Street.
By Nomura Holdings Inc. And UBS Group AG’s former bond trader Vivek Raman is co-founding a company called Etherealize with Buterin and his foundational investments. While Butherin’s firm confirmed the money, he and Raman declined to say how much money was involved. Raman said he and a team of eight full-time employees started work in New York this month, where they are developing Ethereum for financial institutions, as well as building products that make the network easier for banks to use.
“If there’s ever a time to act, it’s now to be ready when all the headwinds are now suddenly tailwinds, from regulation to technology to Ethereum’s institutional presence,” Raman said.
Ethereum was launched by Buterin and a team of co-founders in 2015 and quickly won a reputation for being more intelligent and sophisticated than Bitcoin. The new blockchain introduced by Ethereum is designed to handle complex financial transactions in smart contracts.
In the year During the biggest cryptocurrency boom in 2017 and 2021, Ethereum was at the center of the action and its price increased faster than Bitcoin.
But as the industry resurged last year, Ethereum was outclassed by some current trends. The biggest of these has to do with the ever-growing perception that Bitcoin is a scarce asset that can be used as a digital alternative to gold. That idea has gotten a lot of attention since Trump started talking about the creation of a national strategic Bitcoin reserve last summer.