Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum is of the opinion that the days of astronomical 1000x crypto growth as seen in 2017 is over. In an interview with Bloomberg, he emphasized that such sharp highs would no longer be realized since crypto and blockchain awareness has already reached its peak. This peak was reached in December 2017 when major crypto-currency prices of tokens such as Bitcoin, Ripple, ethereum, and Bitcoin realized returns of 10 to 300 fold. According to Buterin, the block-chain space has reached a point where there is a ceiling in sight. He further stated that every average person has by now heard of the blockchain, showing that there is no chance of 1000x growth in anything in the industry anymore.
Speculative bubble of last year has led the vast majority of people to take interest in cryptocurrencies as a new and emergent asset class. Buterin stated that the industry was done promoting and garnering interest towards cryptocurrencies and would instead focus on improving usability and accessibility to decentralized financial systems. He further explained that the idea of promoting decentralized systems aka blockchain technology as well as crypto-currencies to a wider consumer base had hit a dead end. He is now of the opinion that it is about time to think on how to improve the infrastructure of decentralized systems, DAPPS as well as protocols in order to encourage customers to commit to blockchain based platforms.
In his words, he said that it needed to go from just getting people interested to real applications of real economic activity. In his opinion, developers of decentralized apps (Dapps) will need to ensure that their utilization is as seamless as possible if they are to realize mass adoption in the coming months or years. Apps like Peepeth, which is currently gaining a lot of attention as a decentralized version and alternative to Twitter was recently discussed on the popular Joe Rogan podcast, requires users to send Ether or gas every time a piece of information has to be broadcasted on the ethereum MainNet.
The shift from cash to crypto can be a very complicated one, and thus might force users to use Metamask for processing gas on Dapp through the ethereum MainNet. As decentralized crypto-currency exchange Kyber Network CEO Loi Luu said that in the near future, dAPPS will have to improve their user interface to refine and simplify the process of utilizing blockchain-based systems. On the protocol side, Ethereum’s open source developer community is working on the implementation of Sharding and plasma, two solutions expected to massively boost the scalability of the Ethereum network. Projects such as Cardano and Ziliqa are working on Proof of stake and Sharding related solutions as options to Plasma and Ethereum based solutions.
