By
Temitope Olatunji
April 24th, 2024
Blockchain’s adoption of the Ethereum makes it the first alternate cryptocurrency for the company to add support to since its creation in 2011.
Starting today Blockchain, which is maintaining the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet, is opening its doors to a new digital currency today: Ethereum.
Founded in 2011, Blockchain operates one of the most popular bitcoin digital wallets on the web. After a sequence of repeated booms in user signups over the years of its operation, now it houses over 16 million wallets, which is almost two times higher than last year’s number of users.
Adoption of a new currency won’t change anything for the existing blockchain users. There simply will be the same interface to deposit and withdraw Ethereum’s cryptocurrency as bitcoin owners have. Its worth mentioning, that until yesterday Blockchain.info worked only with bitcoin wallets, and this makes Ethereum the first alternate cryptocurrency for the company to add to its interface.
Regarding the interface, the company’s blog post reads:
Using the same user-friendly interface, you can now seamlessly toggle between bitcoin and ether. To keep it simple, the ether experience will mirror the bitcoin experience.
The launch is also followed by a new partnership with ShapeShift, a registrationless cryptocurrency exchange service built by entrepreneur Erik Voorhees that will enable Blockchain users to transfer funds between their bitcoin and ethereum wallets, without needing to send funds to a centralized service.
For users looking to acquire ether, we’re excited to introduce a built-in BTC to ETH — and vice versa — exchange. Accessible directly within your Blockchain wallet, this integration makes it easy for users to acquire both digital currencies and monitor exchange progress, from start to finish.
As a result, Blockchain.info is also adding the capability for wallet users to exchange bitcoins for ether within the interface itself.
Of note, this year, Ethereum experienced a spectacular rise in value. The market share for the currency hit approximately $390 per ETH on June 12, a rise of more than 4,000 percent from under $8 at the end of 2016, now making $305.69 per ETH with market cap estimated at $28,7B according to the coinmarketcap.com.
The bitcoin has seen a similar rise in popularity in market share, skyrocketing to cross the line of $4200 per BTC. According to the coinmarketcap.com, now the currency is traded at even more – $4317.26 with the market cap accounting for a half of the total one, constituting more than $71,2B. In this context experts forecast further rise in BTC price, which is finally believed to make up $4827 – $7500 according to different sources.
Being created as an underlying platform and currency for apps, smart contracts and distributed, autonomous business models, Ethereum is currently used as the foundation for many distributed ledger ventures on the market seeking to allow users and businesses experience all the advantages of self-executable smart-contracts.
Since Ethereum’s currency ETH is used in the exchange during these contracts, it becomes the means of exchange thus can be easily traded for other cryptocurrencies or for local currencies.
Other services have also moved to integrate ether in recent days. One of them is Falcon Private Bank, a Swiss-based private bank that adopted ether together with Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, becoming the first Swiss private bank to provide blockchain asset management solutions for its clients.