The Ethereum project has returned to its $1 bln market value fold after the reset Thursday, July 21. It is an aftermath effect of the hard fork to recover the stolen funds by a hack of the DAO platform.

Ethereum getting better

The hard fork was reported completed on Wednesday July 20 with several congratulatory messages pouring in. Vitalik Buterin stated in a blog post:

“Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the “Dark DAO” and “Whitehat DAO” contracts into the WithdrawDAO recovery contract. The fork itself took place smoothly, with roughly 85% of miners mining on the fork...

“The recovery contract is already returning DAO token holders’ ether; about 4.5 million ETH has been sent to DAO token holders, and about 463000 ETH is in the control of the curator; a contract to facilitate extrabalance payments is currently undergoing security review.”

Since the debate over the fork became firm around July 1, Ethereum has experienced a dip to about $986 million in market value and dropped further to as low as $824 million by July 8 and risen to $912m by July 19 - a day before the hard fork. By July 21, its value has risen to $1.029 billion. Though still far from its ATH market value of $1.68 billion, reaching the billion dollar mark yet again at this crucial point brings rays of hope that the Ethereum project is getting better.

Bitcoin and Steem drop

Though not established to be as a result of the hard fork, Bitcoin took a slow dip from its $10.58b value on July 19 to $10.47 billion by July 21. The racing Steem seems to have experienced a bigger slowdown. The digital currency behind Steemit decentralized social media platform, which rewards posters and voters online, has been reported trailing Ethereum in terms of market value at a strong pace gaining tens of million dollars daily in the last couple of days, according to coinmarketcap.com.  

As of July 3, according to figures from coinmarketcap.com, Steem was on the fifteenth spot with a market cap of $15 million. By July 17, its market cap has risen to $296 million when it has moved to the third spot behind Bitcoin and Ethereum and $390m up till July 20. The next day, supposedly after the Ethereum hard fork, Steem slowed to $343 million as at the time of this publication.

While this points to the current trend, it is too early to determine what would become of the cryptocurrencies in their ability to maintain these values or their positions on the list of top cryptocurrencies.