Ethereum has surpassed 10 transactions / second….

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the third largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH), has released his Q4 Ethereum Roundup. Ethereum has seen good growth over the past few months:

The Ethereum blockchain is getting close to 1 million transactions per day

Transaction volume has doubled

Transaction speed has surpassed 10 transactions per second for days at a time

Over 100,000 new accounts created per day

…pressing forward the need to scale up

Buterin also announced the Ethereum scalability research and development subsidy programs, recognizing that scalability remains “the single most important key technical challenge that needs to be solved in order for blockchain applications to reach mass adoption.”

Two major announcements as ETH flirts with the $900 mark

With Ethereum (ETH) already flirting with the $900 mark, announcements such as Casper and Sharding may serve to provide the heat that’s needed to lift the crypto beyond the $900 level.

Casper will implement proof-of-stake in Ethereum The Sharding technique intends to greatly increase blockchain throughput by creating better-designed base-layer blockchain protocols. The technique maintains most of the desired decentralization and security properties of a blockchain that we see in the simple designs available today, while at the same time requiring only a small percentage of nodes to see and process every transaction. This essentially allows many more transactions to be processed in parallel at the same time.

The second scalability technique announced by Buterin involves creating “layer 2” protocols that send most transactions off-chain. They only interact with the underlying blockchain in order to enter and exit from the layer-2 system, and in the case of attacks on the system.

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