Having payments, identity and commerce in one
Cryptocurrencies have seen huge interest from some of the world’s biggest companies. Some have been shocking, and some rather expected. An example of these interests was seen when Apple’s CEO came out some months back to declare he has some investments in Bitcoin. While that statement might not have raised any eyebrows, the future possibility of Apple having crypto payments in their chain of services and Apple Pay is something rather unimaginably big. Tim Cook has said he won’t buy Bitcoin with Apple cash reserves as he believes investors that want crypto exposure can get it directly but having him talk in such a favorable manner on cryptocurrencies keeps us wondering what plans they have for blockchain technology as a whole. Moving away from Apple, Microsoft’s director of digital transformation has touted Ethereum to be the go-to hub for decentralized applications in 2023. His reasons are not far-fetched. Ethereum currently has a third of the 9,000 decentralized apps available in the crypto space, and its pioneering role in the growth of DApps, NFTs, and DEXs will definitely bring more adoption to the protocol. It is strongly believed that his statement on ”Ethereum having low fees as much as apple play store being popular for its revenue-sharing” is in respect to Ethereum’s move to ETH 2.0. Ethereum has been plagued with traffic congestion issues due to its huge popularity and low transactions per second. The protocol can only perform 15-30 transactions in a second on its proof-of-work consensus. The move to the proof-of-stake consensus is believed to move Ethereum to over 100,000 transactions per second, the largest in the crypto space and a much better approach to reduce gas fees than the short-term scalability approach by Ethereum’s founder.
Although the Eth 2.0 is a much-anticipated upgrade in the crypto market, what would bring wide adoption of the Ethereum protocol is the Web 3.0. The Web 2.0 has served its purpose well, but any upgrade to decentralized information sharing would involve incorporating its own payment system. Ethereum fits the need as it brings perks of decentralization, unique ownership, and payment to the Web 3.0.
Yorke Rhodes, Microsoft’s director of digital transformation, might have some truth as Ethereum whales, referring to ethereum holders with over 100,000 ETH, have been selling their holdings for a while now. These ethereum tokens have been bought in a steady pattern by smallholders making the digital ownership of the public blockchain token more decentralized.
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum’s huge congestion issues have been a major cause of concern. Its gas fees have gone as high as $61 per transaction, which has allowed small-scale traders to favor other alternatives called Ethereum killers. These Ethereum killers have gained much popularity despite being second movers and offering the same features as Ethereum; they have increased both in popularity and in token price.
Vitalik Buterin and other core developers knew that something needed to be done to the protocol and all solutions indicated in a movie from the proof-of-work consensus. There are major changes required of the public blockchain, and sharding is one of the major ways to achieve this decentralization. It involves creating shards that would randomly receive nodes and move traffic from the main network using parallel block validation. Apart from sharing, Ethereum would need to replace one feature that has given it an edge against bitcoin; the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Its complexity of use in creating smart contracts would mean Ethereum would need to create a different assembly language for the Ethereum 2.0, the eWASM. The eWASM allows for a wider range of Ethereum developers as it uses several languages like Rust, C, and C++ for coding.
If Ethereum 2.0 does not encounter any glitch till its launch, bitcoin might have found a worthy competitor and not just a second fiddle. Ethereum will be a more advisable protocol with lesser scalability issues and a wide range of perks apart from buying and hodling. Ethereum decentralized application number will increase when the scalability issues are solved, making it a decentralized app store.
Conclusion
The continuous crypto news on Ethereum is a pointer to the fact that if things go on well, Ethereum might go on to hit the $1 trillion mark when the Proof-of-stake consensus mechanism goes live. The Ethereum explorer shows the number of epochs, transactions, and wallets contributing to the Eth 2.0. The average staked Ethereum is a little above the 32 ETH minimum, but the number of needed validators has been much more than the predictions for the figure needed. Much more than the protocol itself, the crypto world is pitting an optimistic front on special perks to be birthed from the Ethereum Improvement Program. We have seen NFTs, DApps, and DeFi stem up from the less scalable ETH 1.0, and with the ETH 2.0 on the way, many are looking at the Web 3.0 discovery to be the first major use of the improved Ethereum protocol. Live information on the Eth 2.0 can be seen on redot.com/eth2/, and you can be part of the stakers putting your tokens with the hopes of passive income.
Do you think ETH 2.0’s first relevance will come from Web 3.0? If not, where do you see a new improvement kickstarting its relevance?