The price of Ethereum has soared over the last 3 months, from around $17 to as high as $228 (May 24th), according to coinmarketcap.com. Since its peak, less than one week ago, Ethereum's price at one point dropped to $100 on Poloniex (May 27th). The price quickly rebounded, at the same time Huobi announced that they would launch Ethereum trading. At a current price of $209, many investors have speculated this news is responsible for the bounce back of ETH.
It's reasonable to assume, that when cryptocurrencies are added to exchanges, there is an increase in demand for those cryptocurrencies. The increased exposure and the ability to buy a cryptocurrency creates new investors. New investors into a cryptocurrency drive the price up.
Being added to Huobi is a big step for Ethereum, but there's still plenty of exchanges that have yet to add it.
China's Big Three Bitcoin Exchanges
Huobi, is the first of China's "big three" Bitcoin exchanges to add Ethereum to their platform. The big three exchanges are OKCoin, BTCC, and Huobi.
These three exchanges account for significant trading volume of BTC pairs, making up over 8% of today's Bitcoin trading volume throughout the world's exchanges.
Data Source: coinmarketcap.com
While being added to Huobi is a big step for Ethereum in China, it would still be very beneficial if the other two exchanges followed suit. As the table above shows, Huobi is the smallest of these three exchanges. Naturally, being added to the other two exchanges would further boost awareness and access to existing Chinese cryptocurrency investors. Furthermore, it would also make it also give ETH more recognition to future investors.
With the world's largest population, Ethereum gaining popularity in China is crucial to reaching its max potential. One of the first steps is for it to be added onto all three of these exchanges.
Bitstamp
Bitstamp consistently has the largest Bitcoin volume of any European exchanges. Today, Bitstamp has accounted for 3.61% of all BTC exchange volume.
While Bitstamp was founded in 2011, they've only offered fiat to BTC trading pairs, until recently. On January 27, 2017 Bitstamp launched Ripple XRP trading pairs.
After having success with XRP, Bitstamp announced they planned to add additional cryptocurrencies.
Litecoin trading is set to debut in early June, with Ethereum being "made available shortly after".
While most Europeans could already easily buy Ethereum, by using a smaller European based exchange or a U.S. based exchange, this news is still significant. As mentioned with Huobi, each new exchange that Ethereum is added to brings increased exposure and new investors.
Smaller Exchanges
In addition to the major exchanges listed above, there's a good number of smaller exchanges that do not yet offer Ethereum trading. Coinmarketcap.com currently lists 85 exchanges for BTC trading, but only 57 exchanges where you can trade ETH.
The addition of ETH to any one of these smaller exchanges, would of course not be as significant as a major exchange, but over time ETH being added to these exchanges could have a large impact.
"Simple Cryptocurrency Buying Sites"
As mentioned on our page about where to buy Ethereum, exchanges are not the only way to buy ETH. Sites like Coinbase and CEX.IO have already created simplified options for buying cryptocurrencies. While these two major sites already have options for buying Ethereum, many similar sites have not yet added Ethreum.
This is a list of just some of these sites, that have yet to add Ethereum:
- Buy Some Bitcoins
- XCoins
- bitcoin.de
- CoinsBank
- Paxful
- Cryptopay
- Luno
- BitFlyer
- BitQuick
The Proof
You don't have to look too hard to see the effects mentioned throughout this article in action. We're currently in the midst of a perfect example, with the rapid increase of volume in South Korea."Over the past few months, South Korea’s three largest digital currency exchanges Bithumb, Korbit and Coinone have added support for Ethereum traders by integrating Ether. In a relatively short period of time, South Korea has become the largest Ethereum exchange market with a $335 mln daily trading volume and 38 percent market share.
In fact, the ETH/KRW pair processes more trades than the ETH/BTC pair, which used to account for over 50 percent of all Ethereum trading." -The Cointelegraph - South Korea is Becoming Bitcoin and Ethereum Powerhouse
This could have played a pivotal role in Ethereum's huge recent increase in price.
Expectations
With Ethereum now having the 2nd largest market cap of any cryptocurrency, it's very reasonable to expect more sites to add ETH. Over the last few months, Ethereum has worked to close the cap in cryptocurrency market capitalization, as seen in the graph below. Ethereum's market cap is now less than more than half of Bitcoin's market cap (BTC- $37.45B, ETH- $19.46B).
Source: coinmarketcap.com
With the demand to buy Ethereum, exchanges and cryptocurrency selling sites are essentially "lighting money on fire", by not including ETH in their options. If the trend in market capitalization continues, we may even see more sites dedicated specifically for users to buy and sell Ethereum.