Digital Currency/Blockchain/Tokenization Series: Union Square Ventures Adjusts His Bullish Bets on Ethereum Ahead of Hard Fork

Ethereum’s Hard Fork is scheduled in Mid-October. Amid the lingering apprehensions of Ethereum’s underlying technological mechanism, Ethereum 2.0. has got a paradigm shift in its technology but there have been talks that even though it is instrumental but is still disorganized, as it is still lacking in its entirety. 

Ethereum has been one of the major currency among the crypto-universe. While the Union Square Ventures co-founder, Fred Wilson said back in 2017 that Ethereum’s market cap likely to surpass that of Bitcoin, which ethereum could not deliver. For now, he seems to be quite baffled about ethereum. He says “ethereum, as many of you know, confounds me. It has shown the way to so many important things; smart contracts, programmable trust-free computing, potentially proof of stake, and a lot more. But it remains hard to build on, scaling issues abound, and many developers are looking elsewhere.”

The smart contract pioneering crypto has slid 90% from its all-time high. Ethereum hasn’t gained considerably as compared to bitcoin. Whereas BTC has reclaimed 13k again, technically, after BTCUSD has bottomed out at $3,122 levels, it has spiked a massive 344% in 2019 so far.

The Ethereum community says that they have been a visionary with a proper blue printed future. In the battle of the Ethereum rivals none have come close to challenging Ethereum’s leading position in dapps.

This is striking as Bakkt’s strategic alliance with Ethereum 2.0 could set it apart from the dapp platform opposition. Ethereum manages to strikes a chord if it is the time to diversify away from bitcoin. Hence, the ecosystem like Bakkt who is all set to launch bitcoin futures, has been maintaining their eagle eyes on one of the vital legs of future price discovery for Ethereum also.

Amid these developments, Ethereum is scheduled for its next major update in Istanbul during mid-October. The backward-incompatible hard fork will complete the second half of the Metropolis stage in Ethereum’s development cycle. Ethereum Investment Proposals and suggested fixes for ETH 1.0.

The Istanbul hard fork currently has 28 possible Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) packaged within it. It is one of the most ambitious and significant backward-incompatible Ethereum forks. Major changes include a change to the blockchain’s mining algorithm, its code execution, and its data storage process. 

The changes within Istanbul have been designed to increase the capacity of the Ethereum blockchain and ensure a high level of network decentralization in the short-to-medium term. Presently it is difficult to assess the true potential of the Ethereum platform. Hardcoded limits on computations per block mean that Ethereum can handle about 15 transactions per second across its network, which compares unfavorably to the 45,000 transactions per second offered by payment processor VISA. 

Ethereum’s inherently slower rate of execution is because it is designed to be a platform that allows for more flexible and complex smart contracts, however, these design choices have translated into long wait times and frustrating user experience. Additionally, Ethereum transaction fees are variable (non-deterministic) and users are often charged unexpectedly high fees for attempting to execute more complex operations, or due to their own inexperience interacting with smart contracts. 

The fundamental network fixes within both Istanbul and ETH 2.0 are designed to make Ethereum cheaper, faster and more scalable for developers and end-users, without sacrificing the core design philosophies of decentralization and the flexibility to build anything. 

Mr. Vitalik Buterin who is the co-founder of Ethereum staged at the Microsoft Developer conference and hinted his intentions. Gearing up with Microsoft is smart, the IT veterans recently added Ethereum to its troop of Azure cloud tools and services.

Although bitcoin’s bullish rout since Jan’2019, in addition to altcoin universe, Ethereum, has also been underperforming this year so far. The price gap between bitcoin and Ether has been expanding. Courtesy: BNC reports