Ethereum Climbs Above $950, Ethereum Foundation Huge Grant For Scaling Research
The overall cryptocurrency market has confidently surged above $700 billion and this it’s the altcoins like Ethereum and Ripple who are driving the market northwards. Ethereum has appreciated by more than 100% in just a month’s time and is currently trading above $950 levels with its market cap valuations going very close to $100 billion.
This unprecedented rally in the price of Ether tokens is majorly supported by huge buying volumes contributed by the South Korean exchanges. In this Asian country, Ethereum is trading at a premium price above $1100 per Ether token and more than $500 million average trading volumes.
Another good news for the supporters of Ethereum is that the Ethereum Foundation has approved million dollar grant for the development of the Ethereum platform. The foundation has unveiled two new subsidy programs in order to support and facilitate research for improving the number of transactions its blockchain network can process.
In his latest blog post published this Tuesday, Jan. 2 2018, co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that recently the Ethereum network has started to process 1 million transactions per day. He also said that solving the scalability issues of Ethereum network is “the single most important key technical challenge” which developers need to work on delicately.
Note that unlike other blockchain networks, the Ethereum blockchain network allows blockchain companies to build their own decentralized applications (DAPPS). Recently, a game called as CryptoKitties on the Ethereum network became much famous that allows users to trade kittens in exchange for Ether tokens.
The latest subsidy program is to incentivize the developers to work on the two proposed scalability solutions i.e. the two-layer protocol built atop the Ethereum blockchain and the sharding protocol.
The two-layer protocol aims at reducing the burden on the original blockchain by taking the transactions off the main blockchain. The network will be responsible to take the transactions on and off the blockchain where it can be processed.
On the other hand, the sharding protocol will look after having only a few nodes to verify the transaction instead of each node verifying it. The developers are currently working on finishing the specifications for this protocol and searching for teams to build these implementations and test it on the Ethereum’s testnet.
The blog post notes that the foundation is looking for third parties to work on the scalability issues. In this post, Buterin wrote: “Independent teams of developers, companies and university and academic groups are all welcome to apply; we recognize that different types of applicants may require different formats and processes and we are willing to be flexible to accommodate individual teams’ needs.”
The subsidy for each of the two proposed solutions is said to be somewhere between $50000 – $1 million such that it would be covering the development cost.