Ethereum, having long played second fiddle to the quickest cryptocurrency, bitcoin, is actually stepping into the limelight.

The ethereum price, ascending greater than ten % throughout the last 24-hour trading period and contributing to gains of all nearly 300 % so much this season, remains far behind the bitcoin priced – but price is not everything with the amount of bitcoin tokens “wrapped” into ethereum doubling in August.

Bitcoin is able to be wrapped upon the ethereum blockchain utilizing a number of ethereum-based tokens, like WBTC, which includes surged in acceptance since May, based on information from Dune Analytics. During some times in August, more bitcoin was wrapped upon ethereum than was created by bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin wrapped upon the ethereum blockchain by using WBTC is actually backed 1:1 by bitcoin and minted by locking up bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain. It’s considered that by wrapping bitcoin onto ethereum and making it agreeable with shrewd contracts, users will be able to unlock methods such as lending, liquidity provision, and decentralized switches.

“This provides an interesting challenge for bitcoin. Although it obviously has much more energy after getting converted upon the ethereum blockchain, its underlying value ostensibly comes as a result of the sixty eight terawatt hours of energy which go into securing the bitcoin blockchain every year,” Glassnode analysts published in their weekly newsletter.

“How much bitcoin has to switch upon ethereum before the necessity of the bitcoin blockchain itself begins coming into question,” Glassnode asks. “And, if this were to happen, what would back the value of bitcoin if not the substantial amounts of power that go into maintaining its existence?”

Meanwhile, the ethereum cost is soaring, boosted by the decentralized finance (DeFi) craze that’s currently sweeping the bitcoin as well as crypto world. DeFi is actually the concept that cryptocurrency engineering could be utilized to recreate traditional financial instruments like loans and insurance.

“Following a challenging number of weeks for a lot of crypto-assets, ethereum’s value increase shows it’s one of the main alts leading the market,” Simon Peters, bitcoin as well as crypto analyst at commitment platform eToro, mentioned via email.

“I concur with Glassnote’s accounts that bitcoin is no longer investors’ first steps into crypto – many new investors could be keying in the market directly into ethereum or DeFi protocols, as opposed to choosing bitcoin as their 1st or maybe only crypto buy while they did in the 2017 crypto bull run.”