The Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin said that the time of massive profits in cryptocurrencies such as experienced in the market in Q4 of 2017 is over.
According to him, the end of 2017 witnessed a period in which investment in coins such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Ripple yielded profits between 10 percent and 300 percent for investors. He however is of the opinion that the ceiling for big profits has been reached in the crypto ecosystem.
Speaking at the Ethereum Industry Summit in Hong Kong, Buterin said,
“If you talk to the average educated person at this point, they probably have heard of blockchain at least once. There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.”
Buterin stated that the success of Bitcoin depended to a large extent on marketing and creating awareness of the concept and technology in the first six to seven years but maintained that the strategy is hardly necessary now saying that it has hit a “dead end”. The Ethereum founder said that emphasis of the coin community should be in creating decentralized applications with real case economic utility.
The move from centralized to decentralized applications (dApps) as Buterin advocates has had some hiccups mainly because dApp adoption and use has not been without challenges due mainly to the processes involved in acquisition and use of tokens to gain access to decentralized apps.
The CEO of Kyber Network, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange recognized this fact when he said that,
“I think it’s because the UI isn’t good enough. The users aren’t familiar with the Decentralized Exchanges; they’re more familiar with Binance or Bittrex. So that’s why we wanted to make it really easy for the user to use. So we don’t focus on the decentralized aspect of it. We focus more on the usability aspect of it”
According to this statement it is implied that there is still more work to be done by the blockchain community by making the user interface of these dApps easy to use.
Jehan Chu of Kenetic Capital, a blockchain advisory firm thinks that there is room for more growth in 2019 contrary to Buterin’s assertions. According to Chu, what the ecosystem needs is the right catalyst to trigger further growth.
Ether, the internal currency of the Ethereum network is down to less than $200. The coin has lost value even faster than many other altcoins as founders whose ICOs were hosted on the Ethereum network move their project funds to avoid losing funds meant for project execution.
The travails of the coin market was compounded last week after the news broke that Goldman Sachs was suspending its plan for a Bitcoin Trading Desk, a report that the bank would later refute after the coin market had shed significant value.
