Ethereum's market value has crossed $100 billion for the first time since the protocol launched two years ago. The milestone comes after three months of rapid growth in decentralized applications buil
Ethereum's market value has crossed $100 billion for the first time since the protocol launched two years ago. The milestone comes after three months of rapid growth in decentralized applications built on the network. CryptoKitties, a digital kitten breeding and trading game, has become one of the most visible examples, alongside EtherDelta, a peer-to-peer exchange for trading cryptocurrencies.
CryptoKitties looks like a simple entertainment platform, but Balaji Srinivasan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, sees something deeper. The game demonstrates that digital assets can trade hands using a decentralized marketplace. Replace the cartoon kittens with stocks, bonds, or any other asset, and the same infrastructure works. EtherDelta and protocols like 0x operate on this same principle, letting investors swap digital assets with each other directly.
Stock exchanges worldwide handle trillions of dollars in daily volume. The Ethereum blockchain could support a market of comparable scale. But valuing a network based on its potential market size produces absurd results. Apply that logic to any cryptocurrency and you can justify any price tag. A more useful metric looks at what's actually being built on Ethereum. Apps like CryptoKitties, EtherDelta, 0x, Augur, and SALT give the network's valuation concrete grounding.
Ethereum processes over 1.5 million transactions daily, more than every other cryptocurrency combined. Yet you could argue the network is overvalued. Compared to other cryptocurrencies in the market, the price looks reasonable. EtherDelta and 0x handle substantial trading volume, but nowhere near what centralized exchanges like Binance and Bittrex move. The bottleneck is Ethereum's scalability. The network can't handle the transaction throughput these applications need yet. Developers are pursuing solutions in Casper, Sharding, and Plasma to expand capacity and unlock the full potential of decentralized applications.
In the near term, upgrades to the ERC20 token standard are coming. Most initial coin offerings rely on ERC20 to launch tokens on Ethereum. The new ERC777 standard could replace it, bringing more functionality to token transactions. Jorge Izquierdo, co-founder of Aragon, outlined the benefits: "ERC777 has potential to be the new, much more powerful ERC20. Token transfers can trigger actions in smart contracts. Can be backwards compatible with ERC20. Will prevent token losses. Based on EIP672. Led by @jbaylina instead of an ETC troll."
Jun Hasegawa, founder and CEO of Omise, emphasized that growth matters more than internal competition. "I determined that building strong ecosystems around #OmiseGO / #Ethereum and other awesome projects. Now the time building real usable product rather than compete or disrupt each other," he said on Twitter.
