The price of Ether has reached an all-time high. According to Coinmarketcap, the current price of Ether is $470, which puts Ethereum market cap to $45 billion USD. Ether is the second largest cryptocurrency followed by Bitcoin, which is worth $137 billion.
2017 has been a year of cryptocurrency and most cryptocurrencies have risen in valuation by tenfold. In Jan 2017, the price of Ether was $7, that makes it a 650% bump in the price within a year.
Ethereum, proposed by Vitalik Buterin in 2013 and implemented in 2014, is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.
This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk. Today, there are thousands of blockchains developed using Ethereum.
The project was bootstrapped via an ether presale in August 2014 by fans all around the world. It is developed by the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit, with contributions from great minds across the globe.
On traditional server architectures, every application has to set up its own servers that run their own code in isolated silos, making sharing of data hard. If a single app is compromised or goes offline, many users and other apps are affected.
On a blockchain, anyone can set up a node that replicates the necessary data for all nodes to reach an agreement and be compensated by users and app developers. This allows user data to remain private and apps to be decentralized like the Internet was supposed to work.
The Ethereum Wallet is a gateway to decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain. It allows you to hold and secure ether and other crypto-assets built on Ethereum, as well as write, deploy and use smart contracts.
Get started with Ethereum here: https://www.ethereum.org/