Everyone within the cryptocurrency community has been following the significant jump in Bitcoin’s price over the past week as it has reached roughly $700- per BTC. However, eyes have also been laser focused on the programmable Turing complete cryptocurrency Ethereum. At press time, the value of one Ether is at its highest point ever at $18.50 USD per ETH with a large market capitalization of close to $1.5 billion dollars.

Things are moving along in the land of the Ethereum ecosystem as the value has jumped exponentially. Some say this has to do with Bitcoin’s rise as most altcoins have followed suite with the current top cryptocurrency every time. Back in 2013’s wild ride Litecoin also followed Bitcoin’s rise achieving nearly $50 USD per LTC at the time. Despite this, many would agree that the Ethereum blockchain and native token is vastly different than most of the common altcoins.

Just recently Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has announced it will be sponsoring the Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon 2 event coming September 19-21 in Shanghai. The conference is in partnership with Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and will be double billed with the Blockchain Summit held in the region. Microsoft is now a premiere sponsor for the event, and the Foundation’s members are pleased to announce the sponsorship. Ethereum’s inventor Vitalik Buterin said in the announcement:

“We are very happy to have Microsoft’s sponsorship for Devcon2 and highly appreciate their continued support and collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum ecosystem. We look forward to continuing to work together in the future.”

Alongside the news with Microsoft, rumor has it the multinational audit agency PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is researching a blockchain and a possible Ethereum-based insurance prototype. The proof-of-concept aims to reform the wholesale insurance industry with blockchain powered immutability and transparency. The company is not the only one interested in using Ethereum-like protocols to the insurance table, as the French company Axa is also focused on a similar application. PwC has been onboard with the technological innovations blockchains will bring to the world in the coming years for a while now. In its recent fintech report the firm states:

“Blockchain is a new technology that combines a number of mathematical, cryptographic and economic principles in order to maintain a database between multiple participants without the need for any third party validator or reconciliation. In simple terms, it is a secure and distributed ledger. Our insight is that blockchain represents the next evolutionary jump in business process optimisation technology. Just as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software allowed functions and entities within a business to optimise business processes by sharing data and logic within the enterprise, blockchain will allow entire industries to optimise business processes further by sharing data between businesses that have different or competing economic objectives.”

Lots of good news continues to swarm around the Ethereum landscape daily, and not many people complain about its recent rise in value other than maximalists. Lots of interesting development is coming out of the programmable Turing complete cryptocurrency’s environment. The DAO is continuing to make improvements on its proposal operations, and recently a decentralized hedge fund DAO was just announced. The formation is its own decentralized autonomous organization that functions by “issuing dividends, reinvestments, vote on proposals are hard coded into the contract and executed on the network.” It is safe to say that many eyes are also watching the Ethereum project at the same time as Bitcoin’s sudden rise. With the help of constant development and legacy institutions like Microsoft backing Ethereum-based platforms and events, the rise may continue.

Source: Various Ethereum threads

Images: Crypto-graphics.com