Time to be excited about Ethereum (ETH) is now

December 1, 2018

If your value takes a nosedive of 75% over one year, you will probably face a lots of criticism and harsh words from the market. That is exactly happened to Ethereum, one of the leading crypto monikers. Spiraling down from $1400 to $100 is tough thing to process and it is no wonder that Ethereum had to hear its own obituary almost on daily basis. However, price is only one vertical where projects are measured and even though it is the favorite measuring stick hodlers use, it certainly is not the most important one.

Price is sinking but the Ethereum is brewing on the technology front, hundreds of world-class developers paving the way for Ethereum to become the world’s supercomputer and operating system.

Ethereum and all of its Dapps are the showcase for what blockchain is and what it can do and how it can change the world.

What you'll learn 👉

Ethereum dApps starting to power through

No doubt, there were lots of toxic ICOs that clogged up Ethereum, robbed off their investors and gave ETH a bad reputation in 2017. However, these scammy and worthless projects are rooting themselves out by utter incompetence and legal noncompliance and the good ones are popping up and getting traction among users.

Ethereum is starting to replace Banks by allowing users to receive loans from the Blockchain. Take a look at experience this Ethereum user had:

“I recently used for the first time MakerDAO’s CDP system that lets you « loan yourself » a certain amount of DAI (= 1 USD) according to the amount of ETH you are willing to use as a collateral.

For the first time in modern finance we are able to loan ourselves money based on our assets at an interesting rate (2.5%) without having to use a central entity like a bank. Basically you receive your ETH back when you return the DAI loaned and if the value of ETH climbs you might never have to reimburse the DAI loaned.”

“Millions of people are using the Brave browser and will be at some point exposed to BAT (an Ethereum token). 3d artists are using the Ethereum Blockchain through Golem to render 3d designs. dYdX lets you do margin trading in a fully decentralized way by purchasing some Long or Short Tokens, I just acquired some Leveraged Tokens on expo(based on dYdX) and I’m amazed..”

There are many more dApps worth mentioning but that is beyond the scope of this article so we will briefly touch upon only some of the most known and working dApps.

Augur is working as a fully-decentralized, open-source prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain for any and all predictive markets. FunFair is a decentralised gaming technology platform which uses the Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts and their own Fate (State) Channels to deliver casino solutions with games that are “fun, fast and fair.” FunFair has been launched for many months now and they working on obtaining legal licenses across different jurisdictions.

Golem has branded itself as “the worldwide supercomputer.” Golem Brass beta was released on the mainnet in Q2, allowing users to sell their computing power and earn real GNT for the first time. OmiseGo is the Plasma decentralized exchange, hosting an open-source digital wallet platform created by parent company, Omise, connecting mainstream payments, cross-border remittances, and much more. They had their White Label Wallet SDK public release which is one of the most useful tools in the developers’ arsenal.

Competitors lack the mainstream recognition

One note about Ethereum’s competitors – ETH will remain relatively unchallenged by upcoming tech like EOS, Tron, IOTA, NEO because of the huge lead it has on the newer projects. This might change after 2019. But for this year, Ethereum is too far ahead for its competition to even think of an “attack” on its dominance.

ETH has a huge lead – it has seen major resources poured into it since 2014. EOS might be a challenger but it can not get to the same level as ETH within 6 months of launch of the main net. Attracting developers, getting them interested to launch projects on the network, getting enterprise involvement and attention is a virtuous cycle that builds over time. You can apply the same logic to any of the new blockchain 3.0 projects.

Ethereum is mainstream media darling

Media coverage of Ethereum is also pretty good. Some big mainstream media players do like to bash bitcoin but rarely do the same to Ethereum. Whenever the media talks about Ethereum, it’s always in a positive light.

Another positive for Ethereum, more and more traders are using it as a vehicle other than BTC for transacting and trading. Sheer volume of ETH trading pairs that certain exchanges are doing can confirm this. There is a definite shift happening from BTC to ETH.

Ethereum 2.0 is a different beast

As the Ethereum father himself, Vitalik Buterin said, Ethereum’s current state is far from the ambitious vision of the most powerful world computer:

Ethereum 1.0 is a couple of people’s scrappy attempt to build the world computer; Ethereum 2.0 will actually be the world computer.

It is a new proposed solution for Ethereum scalability problem. Ethereum blockchain has been a victim of its own success – tons of project launching their tokens on top of ETH blockchain proved to be too much for its current design and output. At the peak of activity, Ethereum was clogged to death with trivial games like Cryptokitties.

The solutions for the scalability issue piled up almost on weekly basis. Two most prominent solutions came from the very top of the Ethereum hierarchy – Vitalik Buterin himself. One proposal is the so called Casper – proof of stake consensus mechanism and the other is sharding – creation of thousands of sidechains that would easily scale to millions of transactions per second, leaving even the contemporary benchmark Visa in the dust.

The most recent idea bidding to solve the arduous scaling problem for Ethereum is the Ethereum 2.0 – a completely new blockchain that will have both Casper and Sharding implemented on it.

Let’s have a brief look at what is this latest product from the Ethereum’s idea kitchen all about.

In the presentation by Ben Edgington, Ethereum 2.0 is mentioned as the ultimate solution which needs to be designed with three set of mandatory and optional features in mind: what must it have, what should it have and what could it have.

Must haves are on chain scalability, thousand times bigger capacity than the current one. The other indispensible feature that needs to be present is proof of stake consensus. Both of these conditions are means to the goal which is: decentralization, availability, security, usabiltiy, continuity.

The should haves are less discussed properties like: quantum resistance, account abstraction, delayed state execution and atomic cross hard transactions.

The could haves are rent storage abilities and Casper CBC consensus.

New Ethereum 2.0 architecture is a much more complex structure than the “scrappy attempt” called Ethereum. It is a multi-layered system with an anchor PoW chain on top of which will be running the coordinating chains called Beacon chains which are foundation for the Shards – sidechains that will run the Ethreum Virtual Machine – EVM.

There is a whole bevy of teams that are taking part in building this new complex Ethereum 2.0. Some of them are familiar names like Status, Prysm, Pegasys, Lodestar, Harmony, Parity etc.

Optimistic one is 2021 but if history is any indicator, it would be better to add a year or two on top of that.

Conclusion

The huge crash of 2018 might prove to be a blessing in disguise for Ethereum as it cleaned up the atmosphere around the project. The frustrating and uneducated crew of price speculators jumped the ship leaving more space for discussion amongh the people who know to recognize quality when they see it.

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CaptainAltcoin's writers and guest post authors may or may not have a vested interest in any of the mentioned projects and businesses. None of the content on CaptainAltcoin is investment advice nor is it a replacement for advice from a certified financial planner. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CaptainAltcoin.com