Lubin Is Optimistic on Ethereum Because of Growing Adoption

Ethereum may have lost the second spot in terms of market capitalization to Ripple, but Joseph Lubin who is the co-creator of Ethereum and the founder of ConsenSys defends the cryptocurrency. Today, Etehreum is still the largest smart contract blockchain protocol. And though its price isn’t exactly reflecting the progress Ethereum is making, it is growing at an exponential rate.

Lubin mentioned that “Blockchain is more than a market. It’s a movement. The market cap doesn’t reflect activity. Decentralized networks are growing. 10 billion daily API requests served by Infura. 1 million Truffle downloads. 1 million MetaMask downloads. 12,000 live Ethereum nodes. 48 million unique Etehereum addresses. 3 times LinkedIn blockchain job openings”.

There are three major products that Ethereum is presenting in the table. These are Truffle, Infura, and MetaMask otherwise collectively known as “TIM”. Truffle is mainly a framework allowing developers to build blockchain related products. On the other hand, you have the Infura which is a node infrastructure that helps process requests on different applications. And lastly, you have MetaMask which is known as an ERC20 wallet running on Infura.

And now, these blockchain tools have reached a milestone. MetaMask has launched a mobile client while Truffle is able to secure 1 million downloads and Infura was able to surpass 10 billion requests. These are signs that there is adoption on the part of Ethereum. And despite losing 92% of its value since it has peaked in January, this could indicate that Ethereum could easily make a comeback towards the second spot of top cryptocurrencies.

Usage in Different Countries

According to Joseph Lubin, Ethereum is being adopted in different countries such as the Philippines. Nowadays, rural banks found in the Philippines are using crypto-cash payment system. This initiative was led by one of the top banks in the country, Union Bank.

Now, Ethereum isn’t the only one that is doing its best to get adopted in countries such as the Philippines. You also have Ripple that is looking to solve cross-border transactions. The Philippines is known for having a huge chunk of its economy coming from remittances of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). Ripple has been tapped by SendFriend to facilitate international transactions.

For Lubin, he said that “I believe in blockchain technology because of the people behind it. The developers, engineers, and technologists who build. The smart contract experts who audit and secure the code. The designers who care deeply about user experience. The marketers who tell the story of Web3”.

Problems with ICOs

One of the things that has affected Ethereum is the sell-off of ETH by ICO projects throughout the entire year. Also, regulators taking action on regulators that are selling unregistered securities didn’t help the situation. Marat Garafutdinov who is an analyst at HASH CIB mentioned that “Given the data we have, we are confident to say that ICO projects reacted to the market conditions, rather than dictated them”.

Is Ethereum going to recover? It isn’t just Lubin who mentioned that adoption is a big deal. You also have the likes of Vitalik Buterin who believes that adoption can make a difference in the crypto market.