Ethereum has once again reclaimed the #2 cryptocurrency spot by market cap, edging past XRP by $207 million.

Ethereum Once Again Sitting at Bitcoin’s Right Hand

In November of last year, XRP leapfrogged past Ethereum to usurp it as the #2 cryptocurrency on CoinMarketCap. Except for a brief blip in January, XRP has managed to hold onto its lead – until today.

Ethereum headed into the weekend with a more than 14% jump from $104.89 to $119.81. Saturday and Sunday saw prices continue a further 4% to $124.81 before declining slightly. Currently, the price sits at $121.90.

So What Gave Ethereum the Push?

Well, one possible factor – and some might say the most obvious – is that the once-again upcoming Constantinople upgrade is just sixteen days away. The upgrade had originally been scheduled for October of last year before being pushed back to January 16th of this year. The discovery of a security vulnerability just days before launch, however, postponed Constantinople to its currently scheduled date of February 27th.

The highly-anticipated upgrade is expected to bring five separate Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that will improve the network’s efficiency and fee structure as well as ease the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to the more energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm.

Another theory stems from a tweet Vitalik Buterin posted back in 2017 in response to a comment that nothing other than Bitcoin had demonstrated a long term use case for dApps:

Bittorrent 🙂 But in the blockchain space, I expect ENS will be #2 — Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) October 21, 2017

Justin Sun, who purchased BitTorrent last year, publicly thanked Buterin for his comment just this weekend which coincidentally was the lead-up to the launch of the much-hyped BitTorrent airdrop.

Some members of the crypto community think that the belated love for BitTorrent from Buterin ahead of the airdrop could have had something to do with Ethereum’s price increase.

Will Ethereum hold onto the #2 spot? What factor(s) do you think account for ETH’s price jump? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of DepositPhotos, CoinMarketCap