The price of ether is on the rise after a new upgrade to the cryptocurrency’s Ethereum blockchain went live Thursday. Ether, which has the second-largest market capitalization of any crypto after bitcoin, climbed 4% to $2,807 over the past 24 hours. The changes, designed to make Ethereum transactions faster and less expensive, have the potential to enable ether to better compete with bitcoin for investors.
The changes engineered Thursday are known in crypto as a hard fork, where a blockchain is split into two branches. The primary aim was to adjust how transaction fees are estimated and paid out in the Ethereum system.
