New all-time highs are being witnessed all over the cryptocurrency market, and Ether is no exception.
Led by the rise of Bitcoin (BTC) along with a large part of a larger cryptocurrency industry to a new all-time high, Ether (ETH) continues to push up new all-time heights on Wednesday as the price of the coin is first flipping to the $2,400 range.
On the next day or so, when the blockchain reaches block number 12.244,000, the Ethereum network is expected to update. At the time of publication, the blockchain was numbered 12,237,070. The update will land on Thursday around 12 noon (UTC+1) based on the current average block times of 14 seconds. In order to make the network more efficient, the update – called ‘Berlin’ – will introduce several technological changes.
On Wednesdays, according to aggregator data from CoinMarketCap, the Ether’s price peaked at $2,397 in numerous exchanges following a growth of 10.8 percent over 24 hours. The growth of Ether for the week was 22.4%, while the prices of coins now rise by 110% for the fourth quarter – which in the less explosive circumstances of the late Altcoin market would become more prominent.
A hard fork – a change to a blockchain protocol – is going to take the form of the Berlin update. The hard gage is uncontroversial, so that the community will not suffer ideological differences to create a new medal, which was the case with Ether and Ethereum Classic (ETC) in 2016.
Ether holders in wallets or on exchanges will not be affected by the fork, but miners and node operators from Ethereum will have to update their software to sync with the latest version of the chain. EtherNodes.org data shows that, in anticipation of hard fork, 72 percent of Ethereum software customers reach a ready position in Berlin.
Speculation surrounding Ether’s possible short-term price movements ranged from extremely optimistic to conservative and measurable (and definitely not nonsense).
