The state of Ethereum and its future prospects
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Ethereal (Tel Aviv Blockchain Week’s title event) ended with a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin (Founder Ethereum) and Joe Lubin (Co-founder Ethereum and Consensys) interviewed by Yoni Assia (Founder of eToro).
The discussion was focused on the future of Ethereum and more broadly, decentralization / blockchain.
In the interview, Vitalik spoke about the genesis vision that he had for Ethereum and how he wanted to create a decentralized solution that would one day become “the worldwide compute platform open and accessible for all to build on”.
There has been a lot of debate over the past few weeks on whether Ethereum has any future, never mind becoming the worldwide compute platform.
Critics have cited that still after millions of dollars raised and despite lots of “developer activity”, Ethereum still can’t scale and hasn’t managed to create a single killer app that has mainstream adoption.
Supporters on the other hand cite growing transaction volumes; the fact that almost all DeFi projects (like MakerDao) are being built on Ethereum and have grown to over $500m in locked-up in collateralized loans; and that Ethereum has the largest (over 300,000) and most active (almost evangelical) developer base, as proof points that Ethereum is well on its way to being the worldwide compute platform and the ultimate winner in the blockchain platform wars.
I tend to sit more on the side of the supporters on this one. I have the fortunate position of being able to see where startups today are betting their future technology bets on, and the data supports Ethereum.
Now the above isn’t to say that the trend won’t change. But if where founders and developers are betting the future of their startups is seen as a leading indicator, Ethereum’s future is still looking healthy.
I think we will start to see this trend reflected in the Ethereum price and believe that at current prices, Ethereum has been oversold (this is not investment advice).
To end off, at Ethereal I was asked as part of an investor panel I participate in, what my predictions for 2020 would be but they had to be something that was measurable.
A wise friend and business partner once told me: “Those that predict, don’t know and those that know, don’t predict.”
I didn’t listen to his sage advice and instead predicted that by the end of 2020:
- Bitcoin will see its dominance drop closer to the 50% mark
- Ethereum will hold strong in its second place position
- Binance will hold the 3rd or 4th spot
- We’ll see a Non Fungible Token (NFT) sale of an in game character / item or digital art piece for more than $1m.
It will be fun looking back at this at next years Ethereal and seeing how right or how very wrong I was.
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