The Ether price has touched its highest point for the year just as the network’s lead developer highlights some new developments about the project. Ether is the native asset of the Ethereum platform.
As Vitalik Buterin noted in his blog post on Feb. 14, the specter of last year’s security issues has been put behind and work has begun on various aspects of the network in the progression of its set objectives before the setback.
Around the time of the post, the network’s cryptocurrency, which has the second largest market capitalization after Bitcoin, tipped slightly from $11.20 on Monday, Feb. 13 to $13.12 the next day.
This is Ether’s top reach so far for the year 2017, which has been projected to be a promising year for the Ethereum network owing to the several new projects being developed on the Ethereum platform.
Metropolis
According to Buterin’s previous paper “Opportunities and Challenges for Private and Consortium Blockchains” released before The DAO debacle, Metropolis, which is the release of the Mist browser, had been expected in the summer/fall of 2016.
The implementation of the Metropolis hard fork is one of the key objectives set to be achieved by the platform as Buterin had cited earlier in December. The fork is expected to include a series of small improvements to the protocol.
Ethereum’s Vinay Gupta describes Metropolis in these words:
“When we finally officially release a relatively full-featured user interface for non-technical users of Ethereum, and throw the doors open: Mist launches, and we expect this launch to include a DApp store and several anchor tenant projects with full-featured, well-designed programs to showcase the full power of the network.”
Important collaborations
Buterin states in his latest post that work on Mist, Swarm, ENS and associated infrastructure is continuing with Swarm now at the stage where it can serve the wallet app, though the incentivization logic is not yet in place. Swarm is also being integrated into Mist.
Swarm is designed to integrate with the multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum and its Blockchain for domain name resolution, service payments and content availability insurance. It enables peer-to-peer payment for hosted popular content as they get downloaded.
Some members of the Ethereum R&D team are also collaborating with Zcash on a research project addressing the combination of programmability and privacy in Blockchains.
CoinMarketCap.com shows that Ether started the year at over the $8 level and spiked to over $11 by Jan. 5, probably as a result of the multiplier effect of the rising Bitcoin price at the time.