Ethereum’s third anniversary: An industry perspective on the blockchain’s journey

Ethereum, a blockchain platform that gave a new direction to the cryptocurrency ecosystem since its inception, is officially three years old today.

The platform continues to serve as the basis for a number of innovative projects. Deloitte noted that companies in this space take advantage of Ethereum’s smart contract functionality by building decentralized applications (or Dapps) on top of the platform and creating their own unique tokens.

Furthermore, token standard ERC-20 has been adopted over time, which allows interoperability of tokens on the Ethereum network.

Nick Cowan, CEO of the Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange (GBX) – which recently announced its public launch, said that the diverse applications and use cases for Ethereum and its smart contracts have led to a rich and diverse mix of projects.

“It is quite clear the positive impact Ethereum has had on the crypto space as a whole and I don’t believe we would have seen such a rapid development of the token-sale market without it,” Cowan said. “The Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange focused the initial development of our institutional-grade token sale platform, the GBX GRID, on ERC-20 tokens. This meteoric rise of tokens as a new route to financing for companies has changed the world and I think we’re still only at the beginning. There is still so much more to come.”

Roberto Rabasco, Co-Founder and Application and Cloud Technology Expert of Orvium, underscored the robust Ethereum ecosystem which is “backed up with more than 250,000 developers and 1,800 registered DApps.” He also pointed out that out of top 100 blockchain projects, 94 have launched on top of Ethereum network.

“Ethereum has paved the way for many interesting projects like EOS, NEO, Cardano and Zilliqa, highlighting how indispensable this technology has become across a wide spectrum of industries. These projects raised significant funds during their respective ICOs, but have also thrived as a result of dedicated communities and teams of developers building the underlying infrastructure to enable the simple launch of applications,” Rabasco said, adding that the Ethereum blockchain is giving Orvium the platform to disrupt the $25 billion publishing industry.

Henri Pihkala, CEO and Founder of Streamr which recently won the Plug and Play Global Innovation Award for Performance from Europe’s largest innovation platform STARTUP AUTOBAHN, applauded the efforts of Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and others.

“Ethereum has been wonderfully stable now for years and this is the greatest credit that can go to its authors, Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and others. It’s this stability which makes it so hard for other smart contracting blockchain challengers, even those which promise some brilliant features, to take Ethereum on.

“Not only does Ethereum have around 17,000 nodes running the network across six continents, its developer community is estimated to be one of the largest in the world among blockchain projects, at approximately 250,000 members. In less than a year, Truffle, a development framework for Ethereum, has been downloaded more than half a million times. These are some unbeatable network effect numbers.”

Pihkala, however, said that public blockchains, including Ethereum, have a long way to go to achieve mass adoption and handle billions of potential users. To that end, he cited the example of CryptoKitties, which clogged the entire Ethereum network.

“Fortunately, the Ethereum ecosystem is working hard to find potential solutions. No one knows how vital this achievement will be more than Vitalik himself who said at the start of the year that 2018 would be the moment for scalability and various solutions like Plasma, proof-of-stake, and privacy to be rolled-out,” he added. “As for Vitalik, he’s an amazing ambassador for the underlying socio-economic struggle of decentralization - to return control of technology to ordinary people. There are few others in this space who remain so focussed on those deeper political ends as he is.”

Nicolas Gilot, Co-CEO of blockchain-powered gaming distribution platform Ultra, underscored the contribution of Enterprise Ethereum Alliace towards accelerating crypto awareness.

“Ethereum is an important step for crypto and over the last three years, we have witnessed first-hand the impact it has had on the blockchain and crypto space. The Enterprise Alliance has on-boarded some of the world’s biggest and most influential companies and it is thanks to this revolution that crypto is now being taken more seriously by corporations,” Gilot said. “Smart contracts are already disrupting venture capital, and more money was raised through ICOs than through VCs in 2017. I believe smart contracts also have the potential to change the landscape of the video game industry.”

Further, commenting on the key areas to look forward to in 2018, Gilot said:

“This year, Ethereum will need to prove that it can scale and evolve to proof-of-stake. 2018 is also the year of competition for smart contract blockchains including the likes of EOS, Tezos, and Zilliqa. Our preference at Ultra is EOS because it is scalable, feeless, and has a layer of accounting. With this in mind, the future looks bright for Ethereum. The Casper and Sharding merger, in particular, is an exciting prospect and it will be interesting to see that unfold. This is only the start for Ethereum and I look forward to seeing what the next three years will bring!”