Where OmiseGo Founder Sees Massive Ethereum Scaling and Adoption by 2020
Jun Hasegawa, the founder and CEO at OmiseGo, a billion dollar blockchain network launched on top of the Ethereum protocol, has outlined the future of Ethereum and the roadmap of its growth over the next two years. Massive Scaling and Adoption by 20202017 was a year of speculation for both Ethereum and projects launched on top of the public blockchain protocol. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) and token sales garnered billions of dollars per quarter, exceeding the amount of money companies in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space raised from accredited investors and venture capital firms. The high level of speculation in the cryptocurrency industry was apparent in the rapid surge in the price of bitcoin, ether, and every other major digital asset, which increased by astronomical numbers since early 2017. Ether for instance, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain protocol, increased from $10 to $1,500, by 150-fold, within a 12-month period. Subsequent to the major rally of crypto assets in late 2017, the third-largest correction in the cryptocurrency market history hit, leading bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, ripple, and other cryptocurrencies to lose 70 to 90 percent of their value. Hasegawa noted that the correction, which is still ongoing, has allowed the market and developers within it to build products and scaling solutions to support the next rally. Vitalik Buterin | Source: TechCrunch/FlickrIn November 2017, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin, who has also advised OmiseGo since last year, said that the $500 billion market cap of cryptocurrencies cannot be justified without demonstrating huge impact on the traditional finance sector and and the full potential of blockchain technology. Buterin said:”So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we earned it? How many unbanked people have we banked? How much value is stored in smart contracts that actually do anything interesting? The answer to all of these questions is definitely not zero, and in some cases it’s quite significant. But not enough to say it’s $0.5T levels of significant. Not enough.”Since then, the cryptocurrency community has made significant progress in scaling blockchain technology and improving the applicability of cryptocurrencies. Hasegawa said 2018 has been a year of ecosystem building, with progress made in the development of Sharding, Casper, Plasma, and interchain protocols, which are crucial technologies that are necessary to achieve hundreds of thousands of transactions to a million transactions per second on a public blockchain network. Hasegawa further emphasized that in the next two years, throughout 2019 and 2020, Ethereum will see real business adoption, more large-scale decentralized applications (dApp), massive scaling, and adoption by the government, all based on the development of scaling technologies in 2018. He wrote:”2017 : Speculation (ICOs)2018 : PoC / Ecosystem bui;d / Scaling solutions ( L2 #Plasma #OmiseGO/ L1 #Sharding #Casper ) / Interchain protocols2019 : Real business adoption / UIUX focus tools / More Dapps2019 to 2020 : thereum massively scale and used by gov. We will see huge difference between real adoptable protocol and toxic speculation project.”Bubble-Crash-Build-Rally PatternEarlier this month, at TechCrunch:Sessions held in Zug, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan stated that throughout history, the cryptocurrency sector has undergone the pattern of bubble-crash-build-rally, and corrections have provided developers a period to build sophisticated technologies to support the next wave of adoption. Ethereum and the rest of the cryptocurrency sector has seen this pattern play out over the past 12 months, and the period of ecosystem building in 2018 will have a huge impact in the predicted rally of digital assets over the upcoming two years