Listen, imagine, Ethereum, a cryptocurrency that many still perceive as "second only to bitcoin," suddenly surged ahead and overtook companies such as Coca-Cola and Alibaba in market capitalization. Yes, I'm not kidding: cryptotoken turned out to be more expensive than soda and the Chinese Internet empire.
The other day, the market capitalization of ether exceeded $ 308 billion, and the price of one token jumped to $ 2,550. According to 8marketcap, this brought Ethereum to 39th place among all assets in the world. For comparison, Coca-Cola has a capitalization of 303.5 billion, Alibaba - 303.7 billion. That's how a modest token from the world of blockchain outplayed the veterans of the stock market.
The reason for this jump is the large—scale technical update of Pectra, which was finally implemented on the Ethereum network on May 7. Interestingly, the path to this update was not smooth at all. First, there were problems on the Holesky test network, then the Sepolia network was attacked — the hacker started mining empty blocks, interfering with testing. The team had to urgently deploy a new environment called Hoodi, where everything finally worked.
What exactly has changed after the update? Here are the key points:
Regular accounts can now behave like smart contracts, which opens up a bunch of new scenarios for using tokens.
The ability to pay for commissions with tokens other than ETH has been introduced.
Validators can now bet up to 2048 ETH instead of 32 — this enhances the security and stability of the network.
The scalability of Layer 2 has been improved by increasing the amount of data in blocks.
It sounds cool, but not without a fly in the ointment. Some experts, including smart contract auditor Arda Usman, have warned about the potential risks. In their opinion, the new transaction mechanism may be vulnerable: theoretically, a hacker can manipulate someone else's account using signatures outside the blockchain, which can lead to loss of funds.
But the market is not really responding to this yet — the ETH exchange rate has increased from 1786 to 2550 dollars in just 5 days. It seems that the crypt has begun a period of euphoria again.
So I have a question for you: is this just a short-term surge after the upgrade, or has Ethereum really started to reach the level of global corporations?
