At press time, Ethereum – the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the number one competitor to bitcoin – has been exploding in price and is expected to shoot past $200 within the next few days.
Ethereum Is Growing Suddenly
Ethereum has been experiencing great difficulty as of late and is entering “bitcoin status” in that it is now an “old” coin when compared to competitors like EOS and TRON. Even that is something of an understatement considering BTC has experienced solid growth this year, first reaching $5,000 in April and doubling its price since then. Ethereum, by comparison, has been meandering through the high $100 range for most of 2019 and has experienced fewer spikes than bitcoin and even other altcoins.
However, it has since managed to turn around some of this reverse luck and shift itself into a “growth period,” having spiked by more than seven percent since last Friday alone. At the time of writing, the coin is trading for about $194 per unit and has a market cap of nearly $21 billion. Many analysts are predicting that this sudden rally could also be good for bitcoin, as well as the rest of the crypto market. When one major coin does well, the rest seem to follow suit.
The sudden jump in price is being attributed to the Ethereal Conference which took place last week in Tel Aviv, Israel. Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin commented that the coin is experiencing “strong progress in privacy” and decentralized finance. In addition, the token is planning to move to an eventual proof of stake algorithm known as Ethereum 2.0 in the coming months.
This is interesting considering Buterin’s recent comments regarding Ethereum’s scalability, which he says is floundering as of late. The blockchain entrepreneur commented that while Ethereum’s smart contracts capabilities have made it one of the most popular blockchain networks to build new coins and applications on, the amount of ventures and customers its drawn has hurt it in the long run. Ethereum is now a very saturated network, and as a result, Buterin comments that it’s “no longer scalable.”
We Can Still Be at the Top
In an interview with a Canadian news outlet, he commented:
Scalability is a big bottleneck because the Ethereum blockchain is almost full. If you’re a bigger organization, the calculus is that if we join, it will not only be extremely full, but we will be competing with everyone [else] for transaction space… There is pressure keeping people from joining, but improvements in scalability can do a lot in improving that.
He further stated that while the company is beginning to experience increased competition from blockchain networks like TRON, he’s confident the shift to 2.0 will place Ethereum back in the number one spot and keep it a prime network for decentralized applications.