Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment.<br />Virtual currency fanatics are monitoring the value of each<br />and waiting for the two currencies to switch place, a moment that has been called “the flippening.”<br />“The momentum has shifted to Ethereum — there is no doubt about that,” said William Mougayar, the founder<br />of Virtual Capital Ventures, which invests in a variety of virtual currencies and start-ups.<br />In a recent survey of 1,100 virtual currency users, 94 percent were positive about the state of Ethereum,<br />while only 49 percent were positive about Bitcoin, the industry publication CoinDesk said this month.<br />Many applications being built on Ethereum are also raising money using the Ether currency,<br />in what are known as initial coin offerings, a play on initial public offerings<br />The value of Ether, the digital money that lives on an upstart network known as Ethereum,<br />has risen an eye-popping 4,500 percent since the beginning of the year.<br />The two-year old system has picked up backing from both tech geeks and big corporate names like JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft, which are excited about Ethereum’s goal of providing not only a digital currency<br />but also a new type of global computing network, which generally requires Ether to use.<br />With the recent price increases, the outstanding units of the Ether currency were worth around<br />$34 billion as of Monday — or 82 percent as much as all the Bitcoin in existence.
