Ether (ETH) Ethereum is home to the most developers in crypto | Crypto Great | Bitcoin | DeFi

Ether (ETH)

Ethereum is home to the most developers in crypto with 2,300 working on the network on average per month. It’s also the network home to the most dApps with more than 3,000 to date.

With all these developers and applications being built, we’re beginning to see them interact with one another. And the first use case we’re beginning to see take off is one we’ve covered in these pages for the past few months, DeFi.

A useful metric to gauge how large DeFi is growing atop Ethereum’s network is total value locked (TVL). This tells us how much capital users are putting to use in applications that run on Ethereum.

Today, Ethereum’s TVL stands at $25.2 billion. That’s up from $831 million one year ago, a growth rate of 2,932%. And we believe it’s only the beginning.

That’s because Ethereum is addressing one of its choke points: scalability. When lots of transactions take place on the network, the cost to transact begins to rise in an attempt to ease congestion. Think of it like paying extra to get on the express lane while driving on the highway.
But this isn’t ideal for a decentralized network. So Ethereum is addressing this via ETH2 and Optimistics.

ETH2 is a complete network overhaul. It’ll be where Ethereum moves from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. And it’ll mean a massive leap forward in speed, scalability, and security. The first phase of this upgrade has already taken place,and the full transition to ETH2 should happen over the coming 12–18 months.
Optimistics is a near-term solution Ethereum just launched on its network. It addresses current scalability issues by settling transactions off-chain and then bundling up the transaction on-chain when necessary. This is similar to ordering drinks at a bar and settling your tab at the end of the night. In a sense, when you settle your tab, it’s a bundle of transactions.

One of our other picks, Synthetix, is slowly rolling out Optimistics as well to help build confidence in it. As it does and more transactions take place off-chain, we expect to see TVL grow further as fewer users are forced out of the market on account of high transaction prices.

What’s important to remember is DeFi is only one use case for Ethereum. There are dozens of others that will gain traction over time, and that’s why Ethereum remains a central holding to any portfolio.

Despite Ethereum’s recent surge in price this month, I still feel it’s undervalued. Its DeFi use cases are rapidly expanding and scaling solutions are right around the corner. Ethereum could soon be worth $400 to $800 billion. That makes it a 2.5x to 5x gain from today’s prices.So we’re raising our buy-up-to price today to $1,800.