Buterin: Cryptos Will Never See 1000x Gains Again
According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, cryptocurrencies will never again see the 1000-times growth that they saw last year.
The Next Stage of Evolution
Buterin, in an interview during an Ethereum and Blockchain conference in Hong Kong stated that the massive growth that the crypto and Blockchain industry has seen in recent times has now reached its “ceiling” and that the next stage of the industry’s evolution is about to begin.
Buterin said that now people are moving away from the simply interested stage to looking at ways in which this technology can be used in real economic activity.
Growth in the cryptocurrency industry in the last 6 to 7 years has been dependent on creating awareness and getting people to adopt the new technology. This strategy has led to enormous growth in the price as well as market capitalization of numerous cryptocurrencies. However, this method of propagating the industry is reaching its end, feels Buterin.
Now, the next step is to get people more deeply involved in the technology and its applications. Buterin feels that now is the time that people will focus more on improvements in the infrastructure of DApps (decentralized applications), systems (Blockchains) as well as protocols as a means of encouraging consumers to commit to the growth of the industry.
Developers will now need to change their focus in order to truly achieve mainstream adoption. This means ensuring that the technology develops in such a way that decentralized systems will be used as seamlessly and efficiently as current centralized platforms are.
Speculation to Continue
Other experts, however, don’t quite agree with Buterin’s point of view. They feel the speculation in the cryptocurrency market will continue and will, in fact, go up once more.
Despite the fact that the crypto market has seen big declines in 2018, the current prices of the top cryptos are still way higher that at the beginning of 2017. Total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies at that time were about $17 to $20 billion. Today (at the time of writing), despite all the losses, the market’s capitalization is at $196.95 billion.
The top two cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin and Ethereum – were trading at $1000 and $12 respectively. Today, Bitcoin is at $6344 and Ethereum is at $199.
Thus, according to the “Bitcoin Jesus”, Roger Ver, it really doesn’t feel like a bear market. Bitcoin is already up by 58% since the beginning of 2017 and has soared by 1048% since 2016.
Added to this, Fundstrat’s Tom Lee strongly believes that the cryptocurrency market is going end the year explosively. He is expecting the price of Bitcoin to go up as much as $25,000 and Ethereum to be at $1,500 by the end of this year.