Ethereum has been surging in recent weeks, in part thanks to its London hard fork which has just been activated. This meant the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency will see big changes to its code. The recent surge saw prices increase 25 percent from $2,450.08 (£1,765.82) on July 31 at 1.59pm, to $3,083.21 (£2,222.13) today at 12.59pm.
The scaling issues, huge transaction fees and volatility has been fixed in the latest code update.
This has been done by destroying or “burning” ether coins and making transaction fees more predictable by changing how they work.
The London hard fork includes EIP-1599 which is a fee-reduction feature that has been burning $8,900 of ether every minute since it went into effect.
Ether founder Vitalik Buterin told Bloomberg: “1599 is definitely the most important part of London.”
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He added the upgrade is “proof that the ethereum ecosystem is able to make significant changes.”
Nic Carter, Castle Island Ventures general partner and Coin Metrics co-founder said: “It adds a lot of complexity to the fee logic, but it’s an interesting approach that could potentially stabilise the fee dynamics.”
At the time of writing, Ethereum stood at $3,157.89 (£2,275.96), an increase of 13.69 percent in the last 24 hours.
The returns of the year to date are a staggering 316.17 percent.
Dan Morehead founder of $2.8 billion crypto-focused investment fund Pantera Capital predicted Ethereum would eventually overtake bitcoin.
Mr Morehead told Reuters: “You’ll see a transition of people who want to store wealth, doing it in ether rather than just bitcoin.”
And in June Nathan Cox, chief investment officer at $100 million digital asset investment manager Two Prime said: “In the long, long, multi-year timeline, yes, ethereum will flip bitcoin.
“It’s just now starting to be understood by the second-tier adopters. Ethereum’s utility alone will outstrip anything else.”
Bitcoin currently sits at $43,335.02 (£31,232.45) at the time of writing, an increase of 6.16 percent in the past 24 hours.