Not to alarm you or anything, but the price of bitcoin has undergone another drop.
The price of the popular digital currency hovered at around $659 on Monday, with a market cap of more than $10.44 billion. This is a fall of close to $6 since last Friday’s price piece.
Meanwhile, bitcoin’s cousin—the ether—is steadily recovering from last month’s DAO hack that drained close to $60 million worth of ether from one of its wallets. The price per ether has risen to over $14 with a market cap of about $1.2 billion—its highest since June, when the digital asset surged to a high $18.95 value.
Analysts trace ether’s partial price and market cap recovery to ethereum’s hard fork project, which aims to reimburse investors who lost funds following the DAO hack. Ethereum, as we all know, is built on the same system that powers its cousin bitcoin—the blockchain, which makes use of cryptography to hold and spend money instead of the traditional bank or credit card companies. But unlike its cousin, ethereum pushed the blockchain even further by allowing developers to build codes on top of a blockchain ledger.
Experimental it may be, the idea managed to catch the attention of some of the virtual currency’s biggest investors. The DAO, which stands for the distributed autonomous organization, is the “leaderless organization” that has managed to raise $1602 million worth of ether. DAO also fell victim to a hack that took advantage of a code issue, causing the organization to lose 3.6 million ether worth $53 million.
To recoup the losses, the community agreed to “hard fork,” which essentially isolates the stolen funds and render them without value.
Coinbase adds ethereum to the mix
Another factor that is said to have contributed to the rise in ethereum’s price is the news that bitcoin exchange Coinbase has integrated the alternative coin into its system, effectively solidifying ether’s place among the established cryptocurrency.
The bitcoin wallet, which operates in 32 countries, was one of the first major service providers to add ethereum to their exchange. A spokesperson for Coinbase was quoted by Cryptocoin News saying: “Ethereum is pushing the digital currency ecosystem forward and we are excited to support it as part of our mission to create an open financial system for the world.”
