It is called ether and it is a cryptocurrency just like the very popular Bitcoin. Ether is similar to its more valued counterpart but it is not directly related to a financial value. Instead, Ether's value is computing power. Unlike traditional money, online systems record every trade in these cryptocurrencies.

One ether currently trades for $27.88 as of now and reached a high of $30 on March 13. This value is at least 20% more than the value it was trading for in the first week of March and in that period it took ' ether' to a market capitalisation of around $2.57 billion, the only cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin to breach that magic mark. Bircoin stood in a different league altogether, with a market capitalisation of over $20 billion. Other cryptocurrencies lag far behind - ' dash' has a market capitalisation of over $550 million and the figure for ' Monero' stands at around $248 million.

'Ether' was launched in 2013 and runs on the Etherium blockchain. It was publicly introduced in january 2014. The technology that supports 'ether' is very different from the one that supports Bitcoin. ' Ether' is used as a currency, but also to power "smart contracts." The jargon ' blockchain' denotes a distributed database that stores information about wallet balances and transactions. Ether's public blockchain was launched in July 2015.

One reason why Ether is successful is its traction among big names in the business for the underlying technology Ethereum on which Ether is based. An organization named Enterprise Ethereum Alliance has been set up, recently to connect large, reputable companies to technology vendors to work on projects using the Ether's distributed databases. Companies involved in the launch include Intel, JPMorgan and Microsoft and this probably has added to the legitimacy of ' Ether' and this coupled with the fact that Bitcoin is seeing a big bull run, makes ' Ether' a more viable option for profit.