(Bloomberg) — Ethereum was seen as the most likely challenger to Bitcoin’s status as the preeminent cryptocurrency, and the one best placed to make blockchain a more useful technology.
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But as Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies have grown in recent months – thanks to the embrace of President Donald Trump – Ethereum has struggled to keep pace, despite hosting the second most valuable digital token, Ether. While Bitcoin has grown about 160% over the last year, Ether has only risen 40%.
To help the token and its decentralized network regain some momentum, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation he created are throwing their weight behind a new startup that hopes to market Ether as the best cryptocurrency for Wall Street.
A former bond trader at Nomura Holdings Inc. and UBS Group AG, Vivek Raman founds the company, Etherealize, with investments from Buterin and the foundation. While Buterin’s organization confirmed the funding, she and Raman declined to say how much money was involved. Raman said that he and a team of eight full-time employees began operating this month in New York, where they are marketing Ethereum to financial companies while also building products that make the network easier for banks.
“If there is a time that will work, it is now when all the headwinds that existed in the past are now suddenly tailwinds, from regulation to technology to Ethereum that is ready to have an institutional presence Raman said.
Ethereum was launched by Buterin and a team of co-founders in 2015 and quickly gained a reputation as a smarter and more sophisticated alternative to Bitcoin. The new blockchain introduced by Ethereum was designed to host complicated financial transactions in so-called smart contracts.
During the big cryptocurrency booms in 2017 and 2021, Ethereum was at the center of the action and its price grew much faster than Bitcoin.
But as the industry has risen over the past year, Ethereum has been out of step with some of the prevailing trends. The biggest of these has to do with the increasingly widespread view that Bitcoin is a scarce asset that can serve as a digital alternative to gold. The idea has only gained traction since Trump started talking about creating a national strategic Bitcoin reserve last summer.
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2025-01-23 02:19:00
