The Ethereum price achieved $483 for the first time in history, moving closer to the $500 mark. Billionaire investor Mike Novogratz expects the price of Ether to surge throughout 2017.

Optimism Around Development

The Ethereum network remains as the only public blockchain that process more transactions than the Bitcoin network on a daily basis. In fact, the Ethereum process more transactions than all of the cryptocurrencies in existence combined, including bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, and Litecoin.

Over the past few months, the Ethereum Foundation and the open-source development community of Ethereum have introduced innovative scaling solutions such as Plasma, sharding, and Casper, with the intent of providing both on-chain and off-chain scaling on the Ethereum protocol with second-layer solutions.

Byzantium, the latest hard fork upgrade of the Ethereum network, provided significant transaction capacity increase through a SegWit-like software upgrade, by eliminating unnecessary information from Ether transactions. Consequently, the daily transaction volume of the Ethereum network increased to around 550,000 transactions per day, nearly twice as large as the Bitcoin network.

From the beginning of September to mid-November, the price of Ether remained stable in the $300 region, after plummeting from $390 to $300 after the initial coin offering (ICO) and cryptocurrency trading ban imposed by the Chinese government.

However, in mid-November, the price of Ether started to demonstrate upward momentum, ultimately breaching the $400 mark and achieving a new all-time high at $483.

Mike Novogratz Optimistic About Ethereum

Billionaire hedge fund legend and former Fortress executive Mike Novogratz remains optimistic in the short and mid-term price trend of Ethereum, given the increasing developer activity around the Ethereum blockchain network and the growing ecosystem of decentralized applications.

“ETH looks poised for a move to new highs. Lots of good news on the horizon. #ether #consensys,” wrote Novogratz on Twitter.

More to that, as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explained, non-ICO decentralized applications have shown sustainable business models, through a transparent fee structure. EtherDelta for instance became the largest decentralized application on the Ethereum protocol without an ICO, through its sustainable model and open-source codebase.

At the time of reporting, EtherDelta accounts for around 15 percent of the Ethereum network’s daily transaction volume.

With ZK-SNARKs integration and successful testing of ZK-SNARKs transactions, in the long-term, anonymous transactions and private payments will be made possible on the Ethereum blockchain network as well, providing unprecedented privacy in comparison to other cryptocurrencies with the exception of Zcash, Monero, and Dash, the three privacy-focused cryptocurrencies.

As such, optimism around the development activity of the Ethereum network will continue to push the price of Ether up, and the transaction volume of Ethereum will rise exponentially in the upcoming months.

The flow of institutional money into the bitcoin market will also benefit the Ethereum market in the long-term, as investors expose themselves to the cryptocurrency market.