At press time, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the number one competitor to bitcoin is trading for roughly $274. That’s about $13 less than where it stood 24 hours ago.
The currency appears to be stumbling alongside bitcoin – which currently sits at $6,800, a $200 drop from yesterday – despite several new negotiations and developments in the Ethereum space. Today, it was announced that both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are being added to the offerings of BTC.com. The company – which allegedly produced 21 percent of all new bitcoins in 2017 – says it seeks to diversify its mining portfolio.
Follow CryptoMode on Twitter, Youtube and TikTok for news updates! Zhuang Zhong – director of the venture’s mining pool – comments:
“We’ve had a lot of customer requests for Ethereum support this year, so it was a clear choice for us. By competing to provide the best reward margins along with our product development, we expect mining operations to grow to 12 percent of ETH total hash rate in the next 12 months.”
BTC.com is backed by Bitmain, which is preparing for an upcoming initial coin offering (ICO). It’s also switching over from a proof-of-work (PoW) platform to proof-of-stake (PoS) through Ethereum’s new Casper protocol. However, Zhong is confident this will not cause miners to step away from extracting ether coins:
“It’s still possible to host a mining pool in PoS mode. It will increase the complexity to design such a pool since miners need to deposit ether to the mining pool, but we have a lot of hands-on experience with wallet and Ethereum smart contracts to make a PoS mining pool possible.”
The company’s mining pool will allow miners to carry up to two uncle blocks from other pools. They will also earn rewards through Ethereum’s FPPS mode. Zhong states:
“Because contracts are charged per line of executed code and miners are rewarded for dedicated hashes using Ghost, Ethereum provides multiple different reward incentives to contribute hash power to the network. We hope to expand Ethereum’s network by relaying those rewards through our FPPS system.”
Ethereum – particularly Ethereum Classic – has continued to garner newfound respect and attention from both traders and crypto ventures in the last 12 months. Unfortunately, this hasn’t prevented the price from crashing. Despite being a separate entity, Ethereum has not been able to separate itself from bitcoin enough to fully stand on its own when price fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market occur. It seems like whatever bitcoin’s price does, Ethereum’s will replicate.
News has arrived that both Russia and China are cracking down on unregulated bitcoin business, which has ultimately led to the $200 drop in the entity’s price. Hence, it appears Ethereum is following suit.
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