Over the past 24 hours, the volume-weighted price of Ethereum (ETH) has risen by 7.7%. ETH's market capitalization exceeded $15 billion, allowing it to return to second place in the cryptocurrency ranking, while at the same time pushing Ripple (XRP) down to third – its growth over the past 24 hours is about 2%.
It is worth noting that for a long time Ethereum's price was affected by ICO startups, which in December offloaded a record number of ETH coins. It is possible that the «fuel» for the current recovery in ether's price is the positive expectations of investors associated with the upcoming activation of the Constantinople hard fork. It will take place between January 14 and 18 at block 7,080,000. The Constantinople hard fork contains a number of changes and code optimizations. In particular, they include postponing the so-called «difficulty bomb» by 18 months, which encourages timely upgrades, as well as reducing the reward for miners from 3 to 2 ETH per mined block.
Overall, the cryptocurrency market capitalization returned to the $130 billion level this morning thanks to a slight recovery shown by the largest digital assets. Thus, Bitcoin rose from $3,700 to $3,840 – an increase of about 2%. Other cryptocurrencies in the top ten also posted positive figures: Litecoin and EOS rose by 5% and 6% respectively, TRON – by 4%, and Stellar – by 1%. At the same time, Bitcoin SV lost 2%.
