While speaking to Bloomberg, Ethereum Co-founder, Gavin Wood, discussed Ethereum and how the ICO markets will evolve. Wood also responded to questions from the show’s hosts regarding the market downturn, and how that affects digital infrastructure development.
While speaking to Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg’s “What’d You Miss?” Wood explained that the market downturn is actually a good thing as far as production and development of products goes, saying that “when a fairly substantial interest cycle is going, we find that there’s quite a lot of noise and it’s not always so easy to tell between the people that just want to be in the space and the people that are truly down for the technology.”
Ethereum Co-founder believes ICO Future Still Looks Bright
Weisenthal then mentioned that interest in ICOs has “collapsed” and asked Wood what he feels could spark continued interest in initial coin offerings, many of which are built on Ethereum’s network. Wood notably mentioned that “ICOs still have a while to run,” but also noted that “there’s going to be a lot of evolution for ICOs down the line.”
In 2018, ICOs have in fact seen tremendous success despite the general cryptocurrency market downturn, with year-to-date fundraising far exceeding that of previous years. According to CoinSchedule, in the first eight months of 2018 alone, ICOs have raised a total of over $18 billion, compared to the $6.2 billion raised in all of 2017.
The majority of fundraising in 2018 has been led by a handful of high profile ICOs, including EOS, which has raised just under $4.2 billion, followed by the Telegram private sale, which has raised $1.7 billion. Despite the cryptocurrency market decline, ICO fundraising has not fallen off as the bear market persists, with the majority of this year’s ICO fundraising occurring in June.
Crypto Scaling Issues Persist, Possible Solutions Around the Corner
One issue many people see with Ethereum and the cryptocurrency industry in general is the ability, or the lack thereof, to scale to meet increasing usage demands. Ethereum in particular has seen issues with scaling, and the network was once brought to a near halt by the viral decentralized digital kitten trading application, CryptoKitties.
Although scaling is a persisting issue, there are a significant amount of solutions to this issue, including Liquidity Network, Plasma, Raiden, OmiseGO, Loom Network, sharding, and Wood’s very own Polkadot Network.
When answering a question regarding scaling issues, Wood said:
“The scaling is definitely something that people have been working on for some time…and we are starting to see the first bits of innovation…Ethereum is trying to push forward in the scaling solution space with this notion of sharding, which is something that is very common in data bases where basically you can split up the blockchain in different bits.”
Wood also discussed his company, Parity Technologies, and their solution to the scaling issue, a network called Polkadot.
“Polkadot really is a platform that brings scaling as its center point and the idea there is that the individual shards…can themselves be very specific to the domain or the context the operate in. So they can all sort of proceed together, and there’s no need to process everything in line as there is in traditional blockchain designs like Ethereum and Bitcoin.”
Polkadot notably saw approximately $150 million in frozen ETH following a network bug, to which Wood said, “there will be bugs…we are human, and we do tend to make them,” he added that he now is focusing more on how to manage and reduce the likelihood of bugs in the future, knowing that they will always exist.
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