Kevin O’Leary, a prominent Canadian entrepreneur, the co-founder of O’Leary Funds and SoftKey, and one of the stars of Shark Tank, has said in an interview with CNBC’s Fast Money that Ethereum has taken one step closer to become the next leader in crypto and blockchain, surpassing bitcoin.
Developer Activity is Best Indicator For Price Trend
Previously, Ivey Business School professor JP Vergne said the best and most accurate indicator of a cryptocurrency’s growth in price and volume is its developer activity. On June 18, NewsBTC reported Ethereum is gaining more than 50,000 new developers on a monthly basis, more than any other public blockchain network in the global market.
As of July, there exists more than 1,500 decentralized applications (dapps) on Ethereum, ranging from prediction platforms like Augur to decentralized exchanges such as IDEX, equipped with developers who have a shared vision to commercialize the blockchain across various multi-trillion dollar industries.
O’Leary, AKA Mr. Wonderful, said during his CNBC interview that the dialogue has changed over the past two months, in a drastic manner, and optimism around Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency behind bitcoin, has begun to intensify.
“By the way, the dialogue I’ve noticed on bitcoin over the last 60 days has dramatically changed. It started to sound like the pioneer with arrows in its back because people are saying its not the definitive platform anymore. Maybe Ethereum is becoming the new platform. All of the sudden, Bitcoin? What’s Bitcoin? That is not good for Bitcoin investors. Just a personal opinion, but i were long Bitcoin right now, I would start to worry about it,” O’Leary said.
Ethereum and Decentralized Applications
The case for Ethereum surpassing bitcoin as the leading public blockchain network revolves around the basic idea that dapps would gain significant popularity over the next few years, as the core developers work to improve the scalability of the Ethereum network.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum, stated that the implementation of Sharding and Plasma, two second-layer scaling solutions, could lead to a million transactions per second on Ethereum, by creating a more flexible ecosystem for dapps while leveraging the main Ethereum chain for security.
Joseph Lubin, another co-founder of Ethereum and the CEO at blockchain software studio ConsenSys, echoed a similar sentiment as Buterin, explaining:
“We have our trust layer, layer-one, and we’re adding layer-two infrastructure in the form of state channels, side chains, mechanisms like Plasma that enable our side chains to have high transaction throughput, tens or even hundreds of thousands of transactions per second that are secured, having enabled by the layer-one infrastructure that is in place already.”
Essentially, in the mid-term, bitcoin and Ethereum will be competing with their two-layer scaling solutions Lightning and Plasma, with bitcoin focused on processing payments on the blockchain while Ethereum continues to work on building its smart contract protocol to securely process a significant chunk of information to enable applications on its network.
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