Can the new chapter of Ethereum spectrum come and go?
Following the halving of Bitcoin in May, Ethereum 2.0 is the most anticipated major event in the currency circle.
"The latest iteration of the Ethereum 2.0 testnet, Altona, is scheduled to be released on June 29." On June 26, the developer of Ethereum 2.0 stated that the new testnet was "ready."
For Ethereum fans, this is like "looking at the clouds in a severe drought, and seeing the rain in a long drought", and the community soon became restless.
In fact, the reason why Ethereum is highly respected is largely due to its "extraordinary". According to the data, Ethereum was proposed by genius programmer Vitalik Buterin (V god) after being inspired by Bitcoin in 2013. It is a public blockchain platform for "encryption currency and decentralized applications", and its smart contract functions have greatly changed. the blockchain world. For this reason, its status as "digital silver" is solid.
But everything has two sides, the good side is like an angel, and the bad side is like a devil. In the super bull market in 2017, people frantically chased "ICO", and Ethereum was favored for this reason. However, after the "ICO" bubble burst, the fortunes of countless investors were wiped out, and they became the object of condemnation.
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Testnet High Frequency Iteration
In 2015, Ethereum was officially launched. It is committed to becoming a decentralized global computer, with the ultimate goal of replacing various current centralized applications.
In order to achieve this goal, since the beginning of the birth of Ethereum, its long-term roadmap has set four stages, namely Frontier (frontier), Homestead (homestead), Metropolis (metropolis), Serenity (tranquility), each stage are defined by a set of Upgrade Proposals (EIPs).
It is worth mentioning that the consensus mechanism of the first three stages of Ethereum all adopts PoW (workload proof mechanism), and the fourth stage will switch to PoS (stake proof mechanism), which is its final form, also known as "Ethereum 2.0".
According to the data, according to the planning of the Ethereum community, Ethereum 2.0 will be a new network system under a comprehensive revision and redesign, and there will be four major changes: First, the consensus mechanism will change from PoW to PoS as mentioned above; The second is that the Ethereum 2.0 network has a beacon chain and 1024 shard chains; the third is that the original Ethereum token ETH will be destroyed, and the Ethereum 2.0 uses the new token BETH, and the two are exchanged in a 1:1 manner; the fourth is Staking will become one of the powerful functions of Ethereum 2.0. Users become validators by staking 32BETH and get BETH rewards.
Ideal is full, the reality is very skinny. Although people are full of expectations for Ethereum 2.0, its technical implementation has been repeatedly delayed due to the difficulty of development and the long cycle.
On June 26, the developers of Ethereum 2.0 announced that Altona, the latest iteration of the Ethereum 2.0 testnet, is scheduled to be released on June 29. This shows that it is closer to Ethereum 2.0.
Prior to this, the Ethereum development team also released some important progress, showing that its development work has been advancing in an orderly manner. On April 15, the Ethereum 2.0 construction team Prysmatic Labs released the Ethereum 2.0 test network Topaz; on April 28, the Ethereum 2.0 multi-client test network Schlesi went online; on June 14, the Ethereum 2.0 client implementation team Prysmatic Labs has launched Onyx, the testnet of the latest ETH 2.0 specification, and has generated a genesis block.
"Altona is close to the final version." The above-mentioned developer said that Altona is the first testnet to use the latest Ethereum 2.0 0.12 specification. At the same time, the developers plan to build on this and offer the public the first long-lived Ethereum 2.0 testnet.
Analysts believe that the release of the Altona testnet is an important step for Ethereum to achieve its ultimate goal.
Recently, corresponding to its development process, there have been many discussions in the industry about Ethereum 2.0, with mixed reviews.
Uncle Miao, the chief technical researcher of Spark Mining Pool, believes that Ethereum 2.0 not only brings about performance improvements, but its carrying capacity will not be limited to current financial products. Its track should be wider and its latitude will be more. Messari crypto analyst Ryan Watkins points out that Ethereum 2.0 could have a bigger impact than the Bitcoin halving
Eliézer Ndinga, a research assistant at the investment company 21Shares, pointed out that asset migration during the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade may have certain risks for users.
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Strong fundamental data
Recently, there are many voices in the currency circle who are bullish on Ethereum, and some people even call out slogans such as "Ethereum bull market is in sight". There are various signs that a bullish mood for the market outlook of Ethereum is taking shape.
Of course, the bullish voice is not groundless, and the fundamentals of Ethereum have supported this optimistic outlook this year.
From the perspective of currency prices, the rise of Ethereum this year has been stronger than that of Bitcoin. According to non-small data, as of 6:00 on June 29, in the comparison of the rise and fall this year, Bitcoin was 25.98%, and Ethereum was 72.34%; in the comparison of the rise and fall in the past March, Bitcoin was 49.19% , Ethereum is 74.52%.
At the same time, transaction fees continued to soar as user demand for smart contracts and Ethereum transfers surged. Coin Metrics data shows that on June 6, the Ethereum network transaction fee once again surpassed the Bitcoin network. The former network transaction fee was 499,000 US dollars, and the latter was 301,000 US dollars. As of press time, this change is still ongoing.
In addition, the number of Ethereum holding addresses has reached a relatively high level. On June 22, GlassNode data showed that the total number of Ethereum addresses with a balance greater than zero hit a new high, reaching 41,959,507. At the same time, its data on June 25 showed that the number of Ethereum wallet addresses with more than 10 ETH reached a new high, reaching 276,131.
In response to the above data, Mythos Capital founder Ryan Sean Adams once pointed out that the price of Ethereum is closely related to the transaction fees paid by users in the past four years. In addition, Unitimes community partner Jason said that Staking reduces the circulation of Ethereum in the market, which will stimulate the rise of currency prices.
It is worth mentioning that the DeFi sector has been rampant since March, especially the recent explosive growth of Compound has attracted a lot of attention, and it has become a major benefit for Ethereum in the eyes of everyone. Some people in the currency circle joked that it was time to "do things".
In view of this, on June 24, Xu Kun, chief strategy officer of OKEx, posted on Weibo that Compound's "loan-to-mining" attracted a new lock-up value of 500 million U.S. dollars in a week, which not only pushed the total market value of Defi to a new high, but also surpassed it in one fell swoop. Maker Dao has become the leader, which is bound to trigger a lot of DeFi projects to follow suit. However, Compound already has a certain liquidity foundation, and the mining incentive model only plays a role in catalyzing growth. If other projects copy operations without actual business support, it will be difficult to replicate such success. At the same time, the current valuation of Compound is too high. After all, the lock-up value is equivalent to that of MKR, but the market value is already five times that. Miners need to pay attention to risks.
In addition, she pointed out again that systemic risks and code loopholes are like the sword of Damocles, and they are still factors that cannot be underestimated in the entire DeFi ecosystem.
The implication is that investors should not be blindly aggressive, but should remain calm and cautious.
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Ethereum 2.0 urgently needs to be realized
"After Ethereum 2.0 is officially launched, its impact on the cryptocurrency market will be far greater than before." Analysts believe that from "ICO" to DApp and DeFi, Ethereum 2.0 will eventually move towards financial applications.
From the perspective of development history, in the almost crazy "ICO" in 2017, Ethereum became a financing tool, and almost most of the project's fundraising tokens were generated using the ERC-20 protocol. As of June 29, 271,611 tokens have been issued based on the Ethereum ERC-20 standard, and 5,968 tokens have been issued based on the ERC-721 standard. It can be seen from this.
At present, Ethereum has outstanding advantages in both DApp and DeFi tracks.
According to DApp Total data, as of 6:00 on June 29, the total number of Ethereum DApps was 2,592, and there were 81 DApps with more than 10 users in 24 hours; the total number of EOS DApps was 666, and the number of users in 24 hours exceeded 10. There are 47 DApps; the total number of TRON DApps is 732, and there are 60 DApps with more than 10 users in 24 hours. It can be seen that there are currently few users of decentralized applications, and many DApps are not interested, but Ethereum still dominates the total number of DApps and the number of 24-hour users.
In addition, after entering June, DeFi hit new highs, providing Ethereum with "extra" energy.
In terms of the market value of DeFi tokens, according to DeFi Market Cap data, on April 14, the total market value of the top 100 DeFi tokens was still US$1 billion, and as of 6:00 on June 29, this figure reached an astonishing 6.28 billion US dollars. Among them, Compound alone reached 2.37 billion US dollars.
Judging from the DeFi lockup situation, the locked Ethereum in the DeFi ecosystem continues to rise. DeFi Pulse data shows that as of 6:00 on June 29, 28 DeFi projects that have been counted have locked up a total of 3.1 million Ethereum. Among them, the amount locked by Compound accounted for 38.92%.
Yang Mindao, founder of dForce, said in the Huobi Summit Dialogue that DeFi, as an application of encrypted assets and blockchain, has verified its logic in practice, and has shown growth potential through transparent on-chain data.
Chris Burniske, a partner of the well-known investment institution Placeholder, commented that the impact of DeFi on Ethereum will exceed that of "ICO". At the same time, DeFi will expand the ability of Ethereum to perform all financial services.
"Next, Ethereum 2.0 will provide infinite possibilities for its development." Allen, a senior analyst, believes that Ethereum 2.0 is a financial service and rich application infrastructure in the blockchain world, and DeFi and DApp will benefit from it and achieve greater development .
Yang Mindao also noticed that due to the prosperity of DeFi, Ethereum was over-congested and Gas fees were high. "This limits the use of DeFi to low-frequency, high-amount transaction scenarios, such as lending and large-value stablecoin swaps," he said.
Regarding this point, in the design goal of Ethereum 2.0, its performance will be improved by dozens of times, and by then, the throughput will be greatly improved and the gas cost will be reduced. However, it will still take 1 to 2 years before the real arrival of Ethereum 2.0, and it remains to be seen whether it will be realized in the future.
