Bitcoin was the most popular virtual currency, but with the price of bitcoin stumbling and disagreements over the crpytocurrency’s future has made some of the major developers walk away from the project. The interest for bitcoin is then waning, but this is not true for Ethereum.

Ethereum is becoming the new and popular choice of virtual currency.

Ethereum is a blockchain based protocol. Here are some fun and interesting facts about Ethereum.

Ethereum is Not A Cryptocurrency

Ethereum is not actually a cryptocurrency even though it is spoken about in the same context as bitcoin. Ethereum is actually a platform and Ether in the unit of exchange, which drives Ethereum. Ether is then the cryptocurrency.

Ether is a Fast Growing Cryptocurrency

The value of bitcoin has dropped this year from $434 to $406. Ether on the other hand has seen its value increase nearly five times during the same time.

Ethereum is Catching Bitcoin

Ether has actually overtaken Ripple and Litecoin in terms of value. Cryptocompare.com has said that Ether is currently at a market cap of $424.47 million. This is still not close to bitcoins $6.18 billion but they are closing the gap.

Bitcoin’s Loss Has Been Ethereum’s Gain

With the war on block size wages still going on between bitcoin developers, Ethereum has been a draw for dissatisfied bitcoin investors.

As users are looking for stability they have been changing bitcoins into Ether. In fact, in just 24 hours 60 000 bitcoins were exchanged for Ether.

Banks like Ethereum

Bitcoin does still have a role to play, but Ethereum will become a lot more valuable in the fintech industry as it moves to a blockchain based application that will use smart contracts in order to automate financial processes.

As the demand for smart contract enabled networks increases so will the value of the Ethereum platform.

The surge of Ether could be partly due to the major banks teaming up with startup R3 to test a system that uses block chain to trade.

This test was conducted on a Microsoft platform that ran on a black chain, which was built by Ethereum.