Ethereum price has achieved a new all-time high at $518, surpassing its previous all-time high established on November 29, at $514.

According to leading cryptocurrency market data providers CryptoCompare and CoinMarketCap, the vast majority of recent trades were processed in the US cryptocurrency and Ethereum exchange markets.

Currently, the US market accounts for more than 33.71 percent of global bitcoin trades. For many months, the South Korean market remained as the leading Ethereum exchange market, often accounting for at least 30 percent of global Ethereum trades. Recently however, the US market overtook the South Korean market, with GDAX, the flagship cryptocurrency exchange of Coinbase, processing most of the Ethereum trades in the global market.

Factors of Ethereum Price Surge

From September to the end of November, the price of Ether has not made major movements, mostly because the impact the ban on initial coin offerings (ICOs) by the Chinese government had on the local Ethereum market and the rapid increase in the value of bitcoin.

In early December, the price of Ether started to record small gains, triggered by the community’s excitement on the developer activities around the Ethereum blockchain network. Most recently, Ethereum-based decentralized application (dapp) CryptoKitties gained massive success. The smart contract of CryptoKitties has accounted for nearly 14 percent of the entire Ethereum network’s transaction volume, which is higher than the transaction volume of all other cryptocurrencies in the market combined, including bitcoin.

While many members of the cryptocurrency community dismissed CryptoKitties as a simple collectibles-based game like Pokemon and Tamagotchi with no real purpose, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Earn.com CEO Balaji Srinivasan emphasized that CryptoKitties demonstrates the possibility of intermediary-free trading of digital assets.

Balaji said:

“Why is Cryptokitties actually important? It’s one of the first examples of what people have been talking about for years: frictionless international trading of digital assets (not just cash!) on a blockchain. Basically what Fred Wilson saw.”

On May 14, prominent venture capital investor Fred Wilson praised the system of Rare Pepe, another decentralized collectibles-based game that was launched earlier this year, because it demonstrates the utility of a blockchain.

“Well for one, it shows the utility of a blockchain in action. You can buy, sell, hold, and transfer digital assets and they have value and are traded for other digital assets (like BTC) in an online global marketplace. Anyone can make one of these cards and if they are determined to be “rare” they become digital assets with value attached to them,” explained Wilson.

Endless Possibilities

The system employed by CryptoKitties to process frictionless peer-to-peer trading of digital assets can be integrated into the global finance sector. For instance, with efficient scalability and necessary solutions, stock markets and large-scale exchanges can potentially adopt a similar system, by utilizing the Ethereum blockchain.

The market is demonstrating optimism and enthusiasm towards the long-term future of Ethereum as a decentralized protocol for decentralized applications.