Investing.com - Ethereum led gains in cryptocurrencies on Thursday, as Bitcoin lagged, struggling around the unchanged mark.
Ethereum rose 2.8% in the last 24 hours to trade at $291.23 by 10:39 AM ET (14:39 GMT) Thursday, after the network’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin gave an update on the so-called Casper protocol upgrade, which is supposed to solve scaling issues.
In a 75-post long self-proclaimed “tweet storm” on Wednesday, Buterin promised that the upgrade, meant to speed up transaction speed, was nearing.
Ethereum’s transaction speed tends to run between three to seven transactions per second, still a far cry from the thousands per second that credit card companies can process.
Ethereum network co-founder Jospeh Lubin was also on the wires on Wednesday as he told Bloomberg that speculative “trader types” are driving volatility but he is not overall concerned that recent slump in prices would slow down the development of core infrastructure and adoption.
While Ethereum led the gains among the largest alternative currencies on Thursday, Bitcoin was the day’s laggard among the five largest cryptos. The largest digital currency by market capitalization inched up 0.3% to $6,350 on the Bitfinex exchange.
In other digital currency trading, Ripple gained 2.52% to $0.29058, decreasing the weekly decline to 7.6%, while Bitcoin Cash, product of the Bitcoin fork and the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, traded up 1.8% to $523.07.