With all the recent hype around Ethereum and the DAO and the even more recent rise in value over the last few days, it seems like a reasonable question to ask if we will ever see a sub Billion market cap for Ethereum. So lets take a look at some of the more important factors that may be influencing this increase and you can give your own opinion.

The DAO becomes the #1 crowdfunded project ever

At the time of writing The Dao had collected the equivalent to over 135 million dollars USD in Ethereum

The DAO has also seen widespread news reports from Bloomberg to The Wall Street Journal and even to CNBC which seemed to tie in with the almost simultaneous increase in the overall value of Ethereum's underlying cryptocurrency. This increase saw over a 35% change in value since just over a week ago.

One of Bitcoin's popular and outspoken figures Andreas Antonopoulos took to twitter on Monday to show his respect at what a monumental achievement this was for not only the cryptocurrency space but for technology in general.

Ethereum's (other) assets are surpassing alternate cryptocurrencies

Recently DigxDAO held a crowdsale to attempt to make 5.5 million to fund the production of their platform. Within 14 hours they had already reached the point where they were forced to halt the crowdsale. Overnight the speculation value of this crypto-asset had surged to over twice the initial value based on demand alone. More recently, DigixDAO overtook the long-standing, albeit satirical, cryptocurrency Dogecoin for nearly 24 hours before settling just below it at $20M market cap.

In addition, another Ethereum-based asset Augur has been hard at work producing their initial platform after raising over 5.3M in their own crowdsale. Augur intends on becoming the defacto standard for crowdsourced and decentralized prediction markets and more recently entered an early beta-test stage.

Ethereum's outstanding development team

After closing the initial crowdsale for Ethereum and generating their $18.4M of seed money the Ethereum development team began the long battle to build and release what could be one of the most recognized pieces of software ever. It was not without hardships of all types including: accusations of fraud, being called vaporware, or even having all discussions removed from popular bitcoin websites. That was soon to all change...

Frontier Release

On July 30th the day that may had stated would never happen had finally come. Ethereum celebrated it's first days with a few hiccups but no major problems. Much of this was to do with the amazing development team and their tenacity over the previous year. At this point most people that had purchased as part of the crowdsale had seen their investment triple.

Homestead Release

After many months of testing and bug fixes the first official "safe" release of the Ethereum team's software was released on February 29th, 2016. The release, nicknamed "Homestead" was soon adopted by even more investors and new faces. Not long after the Homestead release the Ethereum community was surprised by their first big boom. The price of Ethereum increased from the initial crowdsale price of $.33 to an astounding $15 at the peak while also surpassing the $1B market cap that was deemed not possible by many.

Beyond

With a diligent and present development team and a loyal group of supporters Ethereum has continued to surprise not only the cryptocurrency community but investors from all walks of life. I encourage each and every reader of this article to not blindly just take my word for it, explore the software and read as much as you can on the technology. Visit the friendly and helpful communities of /r/Ethereum and r/Ethtrader and see what all the commotion is about!

*At the time of writing this article Ethereum had a price of $12.74 USD.