Will Ethereum Be The Next Facebook?

Authored by Kenneth Tan via Hackernoon.com,

2017 has been an amazing year for Ethereum.

Prices has hit an all time high of $800, and it is now the processing nearly double the number of transactions of bitcoin at a million a day.

As we enter 2018, I think Ethereum will be the next Facebook due to the massive amount of use cases that i am finding in major industries that benefit greatly from decentralization & transparency.

Ethereum is basically the app store for blockchain.

It allows creators to build and run apps without having to worry about the underlying “operating” system just like Apple.

Here are some of the areas to look out for:

Fundraising and ICOs

ICOs are the largest real world use case for ethereum. Traditionally, to fund your idea, you would have to borrow money from a bank, give up a lot of equity to a VC, or get an expensive loan from people lending sites. Basically, ICOs is a kickstarter on steroids.

As the founder of fundyourselfnow.com, I have worked with entrepreneurs all over the world on their product to get it ready for their ICOs. Many come from developing nations such as Indonesia (EagleCoin) and India (WandX) where it would have been extremely hard to raise significant funding for their idea due to lack of local investors.

ICOs are democratizing funding and spawning the next wave of innovation from young hungry entrepreneurs all over the world who will eventually contribute back to their local communities for a better future.

Payments & Lending

Currently, the crypto-currencies are quite hard to spend. Crypto credit card companies such as TenX, Monaco, Tokencard are stepping in to fill in the gap. All of them are built on the ethereum network. I personally hold a TenX Card and have used it to spend on daily goods and services using bitcoin.

Monaco in particular, has gotten official approval from VISA to issue cards to Singapore residents. Expect to see a huge increase in actual cryptocurrency spending & adoption 2018 as many of these crypto-card companies get official approval from VISA or MasterCard.

There has also been a rise of ethereum based lending solutions, such as SALT lending and ETHLend. The interest rates are expected to be fairer than getting from a bank, and people globally can gain access to financing even without a bank account.

I expect that 2018 will be the year where we will help lot of the unbanked get included in this new digital world.

Gambling

The gambling industry is ripe for disruption. 2017 started off with a very simple dice game, etheroll. You send ether to a smart contract and winnings are sent to you in a matter of minutes. Etheroll has over 260,000 ethers wagered so far (Around 2000m USD), which is incredible considering how simple and basic the game is.

Keep an eye out on Edgeless and Funfair in 2018 as one of them could potentially grow to become the largest online global casino. They have significant advantages over traditional real world casinos:

1. There is no capital controls


2. Anonymous, money doesn’t flow through the banking system


3. Trustless smart contract to process payouts and ensure fairness of game.

Gaming

The virtual nature of gaming lends itself incredibly well for the blockchain. Many successful gaming companies have started to include tokens in their games/product to fund their gaming ecosystem.

Here are some of the interesting ways tokens are used (not exhaustive):

Decentraland?—?Buy Land in their virtual world. Virtual worlds has been around since 2003 with Second Life and Ethereum might be the fuel that makes it finally takes off

Engin Coin?—?Used to create virtual goods that people that can on their marketplace. Instead of using “gold” in most games, expect games in 2018 to require you to use their own Ethereum game token to make & trade items.

CryptoKitties?—?Tokens represents a digital cat in the blockchain. Over 17m worth of cats were transacted since they launched early Dec , with the most expensive cat sold for more than 100k USD.

What more interesting is that with the use of Ethereum tokens for games, this could potentially mean that you could eventually trade items across games. For example, you can trade an Enjin Coin Item for land in decentraland through decentralized exchanges using the ENJ/MANA trade pair. Virtual worlds economies which are currently “silo-ed” could potentially change with the ability to “trade” across worlds.

Final Words

I see the money flowing into Ethereum and the overall cryptocurrency market as a positive. The technology underpinning Ethereum has a lot of real world usage that has yet to be unlocked and money is being funneled into innovative ethereum projects via ICOs at an incredible rate.

Mark Zuckerburg started facebook at the young age of 20 about 13 years ago, and it has completed changed the way we interact with our friends and family.

Vitalik, founder of Ethereum, started Ethereum also at the young age of 20 too about 3 years ago. I strongly believe that within the next 10 years, Ethereum will radically change the we interact with our world.

Ethereum Forecast To Surpass Bitcoin By 2018

Back on  February 27, when bitcoin was trading in the mid-teens, we wrote "Step aside bitcoin, there is a new blockchain kid in town."

In recent days, the world"s second most popular digital currency, Ethereum, has been surging (despite its embarrassing hack last June when some $59 million worth of "ethers" were stolen forcing the blockchain to implement a hard fork to undo the damage), prompting many to wonder if some big announcement was imminent. It appears that yet again someone "leaked" because on Monday, an alliance of some of the world"s most advanced financial and tech companies including JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Intel and more than two dozen other companies teamed up to develop standards and technology to make it easier for enterprises to use blockchain code Ethereum - not bitcoin - in the latest push by large firms to move toward the holy grail of a post-central bank world in which every transaction is duly tracked: a distributed ledger systems.

Commenting on the sharp - for the time - rise in ETH price (which had moved from $13 to $15), we said "the move may be just the beginning if most corporations adopt Ethereum as the distributed ledger standard: Accenture released a report last month arguing that blockchain technology could save the 10 largest banks $8 billion to $12 billion a year in infrastructure costs — or 30 percent of their total costs in that area." Since then most corporations have indeed adopted Ethereum as the distributed ledger standard.

* * *

Three months later, and with Ethereum 15x higher at $230, Bloomberg today writes: "Step aside, bitcoin. There’s another digital token in town that’s winning over the hearts and wallets of cryptocurrency enthusiasts across the globe."

It"s not just the lede that is familiar, it"s everything else too, especially the forecast.

The value of ether - the digital currency linked to the ethereum blockchain - could surpass that of bitcoin by the end of 2018, according to Olaf Carlson-Wee, chief executive officer of cryptocurrency hedge fund Polychain Capital who was interviewed by Bloomberg.

"What we’ve seen in ethereum is a much richer, organic developer ecosystem develop very, very quickly, which is what has driven ethereum’s price growth, which has actually been much more aggressive than bitcoin," said Carlson-Wee, in an interview on Bloomberg Television Tuesday.

As we previously reported, while Ethereum suffered an embarrassing hack last summer resulting in the theft in millions of ether, the cryptocurrency has drawn the interest of industries from finance to health care because its blockchain does far more than let bitcoin users send value from one person to another. "Its advocates think it could be a universally accessible machine for running businesses, as the technology allows people to do more complex actions in a shared and decentralized manner."

Which is why ethereum is gaining increasingly more converts. Carlson-Wee wasn’t the first to forecast a bright future for ethereum. Fred Wilson, co-founder and managing partner at Union Square Ventures, laid out an even more ambitious timeline for the cryptocurrency in an interview earlier this month.

"The market cap of ethereum will bypass the market cap of bitcoin by the end of the year," said Wilson, who is also chairman of the board at Etsy.

In fact, if one looks at the relative market share of various cryptocurrencues, and extrapolates current trends, ethereum could surpass bitcoin in just a few months.

Bitcoin currently dominates a little less than half of the digital currency market, down from almost 90 percent three months ago, according to Coinmarketcap.com data. Meanwhile, ethereum has quadrupled its share, which now represents more than a quarter of the pie.

Indicatively, as of this moment, the market cap of Bitcoin is $37 billion, 75% higher than Ethereum. If the optimsitic forecasts are accurate, Ethereum, which is currently offered at $230, will cost roughly $400 next time we look at  it, if not more. What is more interesting is that while bitcoin hit an all time high of approximately $2900 one week ago, it has failed to recapture the highs, even as ethereum has continued surging ever higher, perhaps a sign of a broad momentum shift from the legacy "cryptocoin" to the "up and comer."

"We’re absolutely still in the infrastructure building phase," Carlson-Wee said. "But I do think within one to two years, we’ll start to see the first viral applications that are user facing."

In any case, for readers interested in putting money into either extremely volatile crypto, be prepared, in fact assume, a complete loss of your investment as chasing such speculative manias rarely has a happy ending. Then again, trying to time the peak of any bubble is a fool"s endeavor. Just look at the S&P.

Bitcoin’s growth has started to catch up to its fundamentals, which is likely what has been driving its astronomical gain as of late, he said. Others have attributed the surge to speculation, as well as increased interest in Asia and adoption by established companies.

Impressive performance aside, more than $150 has been knocked off bitcoin’s price since late last week amid concerns about transaction speed, safety and a possible price bubble.

Full interview below.