Ethereum has been the “wonder” of the crypto currency world for a second week in a row. As the Bitcoin blocksize debate has caused disunity and discord amongst the bitcoin community, a fair amount of BTC money is flooding across into ETH.

That said the market cap of Ethereum has breached the $350 million dollar market cap putting it second in CryptoCompare’s market capitalisation rankings overtaking Ripple and Litecoin.

So what has caused this rampant price rise. Although there hasn’t been a major news piece to drive the price, there has been a trickle of minor announcements that have shown increasing adoption and approval of Ethereum and its underlying technology – from a gradual approach towards Homestead at 80% complete, Consensys releases, R3’s continued support of Ethereum, ubuntu phone collaboration and the Bitnation constitution being coded in Ethereum.

The flood and price rise can be seen in the numbers with over 60,000 BTC trading across from Bitcoin to Ether in a 24 hour period. Comparing this to Bitcoin USD volume at roughly 80,000-100,000 BTC in a 24 hour period for the past week you have a significant trend in force.

This upswing has dragged along the other fiat trading pairs increasing their volumes. Conversely to Bitcoin this seems to being led by the Euro pair pulling in most of the fiat volume – with EUR 400k compared to USD 100k. This is due to Kraken exchange dominance in Ether fiat trading and a European bent to the recent confidence.

As for the community aspect Ethereum has 8,000 subscribers on Reddit and 24,000 twitter followers – the trend has been upwards meaning it has been gaining momentum.

There have also been reports of messages being sent to bitcoin subscribers on reddit pushing and compelling them to look at ethereum as an alternative to bitcoin.

Although the price rise has no clear reasons – the underlying force is a hedge from bitcoin users seeing potential and a smaller yet growing trend of fiat users not wanting to miss out.

Charts and Data Analysis Courtesy of CryptoCompare.com