Ethereum's price surge continued into today as the digital currency topped $700 to reach a high of $750 according to coinmarketcap.com. This brought Ethereum’s market capitalization to an astonishing $72.5 bln. However, as Bitcoin mounted a comeback, returning to near-record highs, Ethereum slipped. At press time, Ethereum was trading for $640.

Transaction throughput

The network's transaction speed and fee normalisation seem to have influenced the price increase. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on Twitter Wednesday that the Ethereum network surpassed 10 transactions per second for an entire day on Tuesday.

Good news: we just surpassed 10 tx/sec for an entire day yesterday.https://t.co/axOWBAvO1x pic.twitter.com/xQBA2s1XOh — Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) December 13, 2017

This has brought down unconfirmed, pending transactions considerably. Ethereum and Bitcoin in recent times have been experiencing huge numbers of pending transactions. According to Etherscan.io, Ethereum processed a record 828899 Transactions on Tuesday.

Praise

In a related development, Donald McIntyre, founder of Etherplan, has congratulated Vitalik Buterin and the entire Ethereum team on the normalisation of Ethereum’s processing speed. In a post on Twitter, he wrote: