The value of Ether, the cryptocurrency behind the smart contract enabled decentralized platform Ethereum, has continuously declined over the past week. The marketcap of Ethereum has dropped by nearly 25% overnight on March 19, from US$1 billion to US$770 million, and the daily volume of Ethereum declined by around 2.7x.

Since the beginning of March, an increasing number of exchanges, trading platforms and financial institutions behind Ethereum projects such as R3 and Microsoft Azure have begun to adopt and utilize the Ethereum platform to build decentralized applications and process smart contract-based settlements. The Ethereum team expects more startups and applications to use the Ethereum due to the successful launch of Ethereum Homestead.

“Homestead is the second major version release of the Ethereum platform, which includes several protocol changes and a networking change that gives us the ability to do further network upgrades Over the next couple of weeks, the teams will come together to pave the road for future development on both the Ethereum protocol as well as a roadmap for the clients and sub-protocols such as Swarm and Whisper.” – Ethereum Co-founder Jeffrey Wilcke

Popular applications and platforms such as Storj.io are also considering of moving their services and products to the Ethereum network for transparency and efficiency.

Despite the positive development and adoption of Ethereum’s newly launched Homestead release, the price of Ethereum has fallen rapidly over the past few days due to the re-emergence of Counterparty and concerns from speculators.

Counterparty is an open platform that enables users to process smart contract-based settlements with its robust and secure marketplace built around the Bitcoin network. However, the platform itself replicates the structure of Ethereum and its smart contract processing technology. Recently, the Counterparty team has announced that their platform could use the Ethereum technology and enable all of the services provided by the Ethereum network on the Bitcoin blockchain. Thus, by harnessing the power of the Bitcoin network, Counterparty can build an even stronger and secure Ethereum platform on top of the Bitcoin network.