By Eurasia Business News – February 8, 2021

Ethereum is a blockchain protocol designed in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian developer. Picture : Ethereum coin – Photo credits : Pexels.

On February 8th, the price of Ethereum exceeded $ 1.7 thousand, very close to the all-time high of $ 1.76 thousand, set last week.

The value of the asset began to rise sharply after Tesla announced the purchase of bitcoins for $ 1.5 billion in January. Meanwhile, the value of the cryptocurrency created in 2009 renewed its all-time high at around $ 44.9 thousand.

On February 5, Ethereum already peaked at $ 1.76 thousand, after which the rate dropped to $ 1.49 thousand. Since the beginning of 2021, the cryptocurrency has risen in price by $ 1,000. One of the factors behind the price jump could be the launch of Ethereum futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange CME. The new product was presented on the night of February 8th. CME is a US-registered designated contract market (DCM) and derivatives clearing organization (DCO).

Futures contracts on Ethereum are settled in cash and based on the ether-dollars benchmark rate of CME CF as detailed on the website. Each contract contains 50 ethers. Upon expiration of the contract, investors will receive the dollar equivalent.

A futures contract is a financial instrument that allows you to buy or sell an underlying asset at a price and on a date fixed in advance. This is not the CME’s first step into the world of cryptocurrencies. At the end of 2017, the world’s largest derivatives exchange launched a Bitcoin futures contract. 

On January 28th, the Reddit portal announced a partnership with the Ethereum Foundation. Together they will be looking for solutions to scale the blockchain. The jointly developed technology will be publicly available for everyone to use.

What is Ethereum ?

Ethereum is a blockchain protocol designed by Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian developer which entered in 2017 the top 10 of the rating “40 most influential young people under 40” according to Fortune magazine. Blockchain is a technology that allows information to be stored and transmitted transparently, securely and without a central control body. Launched in 2015, Ethereum, the second blockchain in terms of valuation after Bitcoin, allows the development of decentralized applications, called Dapps. It is different from Bitcoin, which is only focused on peer-to-peer payment. On exchange platforms, Ethereum is designated by the acronym “ETH”. Ether should not be confused with Ether Classic (ETC), which is a derivative of the original created following a hard fork, in 2016.

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