Has Ethereum Lost Its Charm?

Has Ethereum finally lost its charm? According to Vitalik Buterin, he believes that the bull run of last year is no longer happening. In the last six months or so, Ethereum dropped from its peak of $800 to a mere $200. And for this reason, there are those investors wondering if Ethereum has bottomed already.

And also, Ripple has already overtaken Ethereum in terms of market capitalization. But what really happened to Ethereum?

Is Ethereum Already Running in Full Capacity?

One thing that people worry of is if the Ethereum blockchain has been running in full capacity. Since the Ethereum blockchain was clogged by CryptoKitties dApp, many are asking if this is the case. In addition to this, you have a number of ICOs on the platform that is already selling of the funds that they have raised. And this resulted in a bearish trend for the cryptocurrency.

Afri Schoedon who is a developer who is working on the Parity client for Ethereum have already asked users “to stop deploying dApps to Ethereum”. The reason behind it is that the blockchain is running at full capacity.

If you will take a closer look at the activity by Ethereum, it is running at full capacity. It handles 68,000 transactions still in the mempool. And for this reason, it might be alarming if you have developed dApps on the Ethereum blockchain.

Buterin Disagrees That Ethereum is Running on Full Capacity

Vitalik Buterin, who is the co-founder of Ethereum has offered his insights regarding this. He mentioned that he disagrees. He said that “Most dapps have lots of room to gas-optimize, and even if *you* don’t your dapp running raises gas fees and pressures *others* to gas-optimize. There’s *plenty* of low-value spam on chain. And everyone should be looking into layer-2 solutions”.

The Rise of Ripple

On the other side of the spectrum, you have Ripple’s resurgence that topped Ethereum from its second place position. Since dealing with lawsuits, Ripple experienced troubles. There were lawsuits that claim Ripple Labs sold them a security. In addition to this, the US Securities and Exchange Commission also didn’t include Ripple when it announced that Ethereum and Bitcoin were considered as commodities.

However, Ripple continued to work in order to “decentralize” XRP. They were able to hire individuals into their team that could help decentralize the cryptocurrency. In addition to this, you also can’t deny the effort of Ripple when it comes to using celebrities from Ashton Kutcher to Bill Gates.

It was announced that xRapid is going to be commercially available in the coming months. This means that it can speed up cross-border transactions on banks. What it does is it allows users to send money elsewhere by buying XRP. The XRP is then converted into the currency which the other party is receiving.

Ripple has partnered with different entities from Santander and Western Union. However, is this going to really make a big difference? Western Union has mentioned that Ripple product wasn’t able to bring the cost of cross-border transaction down.