Ethereum — The Future is Now

14 min readOct 27, 2020

Ethereum, the largest blockchain network for decentralized applications, and home to the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is turning five. Since its launch in 2015, Ethereum has attracted some of the largest companies in the world. Countless multinationals, Fortune 100 companies are building on it. Even the Thai, French and Australian Central Bank announced they will begin piloting their Central Bank Digital Currency using Ethereum.

Ethereum also has made it possible to restructure finance, challenging the status quo, doing away with intermediaries and rent seeking structures in favor of peer to peer decentralized finance, DeFi. A whole new world of lending, borrowing and earning interest on your crypto assets has ballooned to nearly $12 Billion dollars.

Finally, as Ethereum shifts from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, there is a once in a lifetime opportunity to accumulate at least 32 ETH in order to participate in securing the network. ETH 2.0 will allow you to earn a passive income, 14% APY off staking rewards.

Active Users — Actual Economic Activity

Ethereum has more than half a million daily active addresses, which has doubled YTD and now sits comfortably at an all-time high. This feels very similar to the explosive growth of the internet and internet stocks throughout history, which price very closely mirrored increased user growth. It appears Ethereum is simply repeating history, as shown in Google, Internet Stocks and Ethereum.

Enterprise Adaption

In a survey from Deloitte, 95% of respondents stated that their companies plan to invest in blockchain tech this year. Similarly, PwC conducted another survey of 600 executives in which 84% expressed that their companies are already involved with distributed ledger technology.

Forbes recently released a new list that features 50 companies — with minimum revenues or valuations of $1 billion and U.S. operations — that are exploring or integrating blockchain technology into their operations.

Of the fifty companies, thirty-two are building on Ethereum or Enterprise Ethereum derived blockchains platforms.

The large developer community, existing standards developed by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and public compatibility are driving some of Enterprise Ethereum’s reported dominance.

Supply Chain and Retail

Amazon — Amazon Web Services (AWS) indirectly operates nearly 25 percent of all Ethereum nodes
Overstock — First major retailer to accept Bitcoin and Ethereum as payment.

Consumer Goods and Beverages

Anheuser-Busch Inbev — announced a partnership with Kiip to launch a series of advertising campaigns with Ethereum to track marketing data.
Coca Cola — Utilizing the Baseline Protocol, the goal is to establish a “Coca-Cola Bottling Harbor” enabling a low-barrier network onboarding process for Coca-Cola Bottling suppliers. The Baseline Protocol is a collection of software on top of Ethereum that enables the internal systems of two or more companies to be synchronized without storing confidential data on the public blockchain.

Consultancy

Ernst & Young — OpsChain Network Procurement platform is designed to enable companies to run private end-to-end procurement activities. The platform utilizes open-source software including the Microsoft-backed Baseline Protocol and operates on the public Ethereum blockchain.

Banking and Financial Services

JP Morgan — Quorum, the enterprise blockchain platform developed by mega-bank JPMorgan Chase, is being acquired by ConsenSys, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Ethereum venture studio.
J.P. Morgan supported Project Ubin, a collaborative industry project in which the Monetary Authority of Singapore and 11 institutional banks prototyped a real-time gross settlement solution using a Quorum network on the Ethereum blockchain.
Citigroup — has invested in half a dozen startups, primarily working off the Ethereum blockchain, to develop applications for securities settlement, credit derivative swaps and insurance payments. Last year, Citi partnered with Barclays and software infrastructure provider CLS to launch LedgerConnect, an app store where companies can shop for blockchain tools.
ING — is part of several Ethereum initiatives. First, Komgo, a project designed to streamline trading documents that is “already commercially live at ING”. It’s also part of Fnality, an Ethereum-based payments settlement consortium that is planned to be tested by the end of the year. Finally, there’s Bamboo, a bilateral letter of credit.
Fidelity — launched custody services this year for institutional investors who want to store their cryptocurrencies safely and it’s also building a trading platform that allows a large block of cryptocurrency to be purchased by executing orders across multiple exchanges. Some of its key digital assets include Bitcoin and Ethereum. Fidelity has been mining both Bitcoin and Ethereum since 2014.
Signature Bank — the New York bank has its own token, Signet, which is backed by U.S. dollars and which was built atop the Ethereum blockchain.
UBS — UBS and six other banks use the Ethereum network for data reconciliation. The adoption of the Ethereum network is part of the ‘Madrec’ plan, working on development of the Utility Settlement Coin, a cryptocurrency designed to transfer money from bank to bank.
Northern Trust — which manages US$1.1 trillion worth of assets, helped the World Bank execute a US$79 million bond issue last year via the Ethereum blockchain. The asset manager is also working with the Australian Securities Exchange on a Ethereum blockchain-based equities clearing, settlement and custody platform.
Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation — Project Whitney, a platform, which uses Ethereum as its core technology, embraces a new approach to the representation of value in capital markets and signals an era of increased efficiency for financial services. Project Whitney was released in tandem with Project Ion, an accelerated settlement project that further explores shortening clearing and settlement cycles.

Energy

BP PLC — investing in blockchain technology to improve the efficiency of commodities trade finance. It’s a founding member of Vakt, a blockchain platform that aims to digitize parts of energy trading that remain slow, such as contracts and invoicing. So far, BP has invested more than $20 million in blockchain projects.

Healthcare and Insurance

Ciox Health — the biggest manager of medical records in the United States has been studying the use of the Ethereum blockchain to cut paperwork redundancies, reduce medical mistakes and provide a new source of subscription income.
Metlife — MetLife Plans To Disrupt $2.7 Trillion Life Insurance Industry Using Ethereum Blockchain

Fintech

Coinbase — With more than 20 million users and a valuation of $8 billion, Coinbase is the dominant U.S. cryptocurrency exchange. It offers custody, wallet services and both retail and institutional trading platforms. The blue chip among crypto-first financial firms is poised to become even more dominant when institutional usage of blockchain grows.

Software and Information Technology

Google — numerous investments in blockchain, creating a suite of tools that make it easier to search and analyze cryptocurrency transactions, including for Ethereum, allowing users to essentially “Google” public blockchains.
HPE — the enterprise technology spin-off from Hewlett Packard, counts more than a dozen customers, including car parts maker Continental, which will use HPE’s Ethereum-based blockchain technology to track a vehicle’s location and a driver’s license and insurance.
Microsoft — has launched Azure Blockchain Workbench, a tool for developing blockchain apps for the Ethereum blockchain. Azure Blockchain Tokens lets enterprises, or anyone really, design, issue and manage a wide range of assets, which like bitcoin, can be proved to exist only in one place at a time, making them much more difficult to forge and much easier to audit. Whereas bitcoin is comparable to fungible assets like money or gold, Azure Blockchain Tokens will come in many flavors, including non-fungible bonds, documents and tickets.
Siemens — startup LO3 will work with Siemens to grow its TransActive Grid initiative, which enables participants to sell excess power to other microgrid stakeholders. In turn, Siemens will provide the startup with its microgrid control technology, the two firms said today. LO3 was recently awarded a patent for its decentralized energy transfer work by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Telecommunications

Comcast — has invested in no less than seven enterprise blockchain startups, including Blockdaemon, which builds software to help enterprises build applications that use Bitcoin and Ethereum and comply with current regulations, for instance protecting the privacy of health records.

Electronics Manufacturing

Intel — is one of the bigger corporate forces pushing blockchain into the enterprise market. Its open-source Hyperledger Sawtooth (Ethereum Compatible) platform lets companies build their own blockchains. Users include Cargill, T-Mobile and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
Samsung — Samsung has confirmed their flagship phone, S10, comes with what they call a secure storage backed by hardware, which houses your private keys for blockchain-enabled mobile services. The phone also supports the Ethereum ERC 1155 standard.

Ethereum Enterprise Alliance

The EEA was formed to ensure a better future for the Ethereum blockchain. Its founding members include Accenture, Banco Santander, BlockApps, BNY Mellon, CME Group, ConsenSys, IC3, Intel, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, and Nuco. Together, the members of the EEA hope to learn from the success of Ethereum and promote software development that can make the complex process usable for businesses around the world. They are working on making sure many companies around the world utilize the Ethereum blockchain.

Bank of Thailand to use enterprise Ethereum for retail CBDC prototype with ConsenSys

ConsenSys announced it would be developing a proof of concept with the Bank of Thailand for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) or digital Baht.

Charles d’Haussy, Director at ConsenSys commented that the exploration of a retail CBDC “will allow financial institutions and merchants throughout Thailand to enhance the speed and security of their daily payments infrastructure.”

Societe Generale partners ConsenSys for French CBDC experiments

The French bank has enlisted specialist ConsenSys to help with further pilots, focusing in particular on CBDC issuance and management, delivery versus payment, and cross-ledger interoperability.

Reserve Bank of Australia Partners with Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, ConsenSys & Perpetual on Wholesale CBDC Project

The project will involve the development of a proof-of-concept (POC) for the issuance of a tokenized form of CBDC that can be used by wholesale market participants for the funding, settlement, and repayment of a tokenized syndicated loan on an Ethereum-based DLT platform.

Programmable Money

The Bitcoin blockchain — the blockchain and crypto asset people usually discover first — is optimized for security and anti-seizure, which makes it perfectly suited to serve as digital gold. Another category of blockchains are focused on being payment vehicles, and thus prioritize features like speed, privacy, or price stability; examples include XRP, USDC, Zcash, and Monero.

Ethereum was the first, and is today the largest, blockchain optimized for programmability though digital smart contracts. This may be one of the most exciting applications of blockchain technology.

The programmable smart contract allows a crypto asset transaction to take on a more complex form; something like,

“Alice sends cryptoasset X to Bob, but only after Carol also agrees with this transaction.”

Smart contracts automatically execute transactions if certain conditions are met.

This may sound to you a lot like an escrow transaction, which is regularly used by individuals completing home purchases or by companies executing M&A deals. The difference, and the breakthrough, is that crypto allows you to do this without an escrow company, lawyers, or a bank … and as a result without any of their fees, delays waiting for them to be open and responsive to you, or biases.

The ability to execute transactions more complex than a direct payment is what defines the concept of “programmable money.” Many crypto assets (including Bitcoin) can handle the simplest forms of these transactions, but the Ethereum blockchain is designed to support complete customizability and complexity.

Ethereum’s core value proposition today is to ask the question: What if we could apply the “programmable transactions” capability to rethink virtually every type of service offered by the financial industry, from simple escrow accounts and trust entities to such complex ideas as capital raising, collateralized borrowing, product structuring, lending, margin trading, and more?

What if we could replace huge chunks of the rent-seeking, history-of-bad-behavior, and solvency-risk financial system with something software-based, easy to audit, non-reliant on human judgment, and vastly more efficient?

What is DeFi?

DeFi is an abbreviation of the phrase decentralized finance which generally refers to the digital assets and financial smart contracts, protocols, and decentralized applications (DApps) built on Ethereum. In simpler terms, it’s financial software built on the blockchain that can be pieced together like money Legos.

Decentralized Lending

To date, the biggest sector by far for decentralized applications has been lending & borrowing crypto assets. Several high quality products have been built that allow users to borrow and lend directly on the Ethereum blockchain with no intermediaries.

Decentralized lending products are available to anyone, anywhere, and require only an Ethereum wallet to use. These products are already seeing real usage today with total USD volumes in the hundreds of millions.

Compound is one of these decentralized lending platforms which provides the functionality you might expect from a bank. Savers can deposit crypto assets and earn interest, while borrowers can access collateralized loans on the platform. As discussed, there are no trusted third parties between the user who lends and the user that borrows; it’s all taken care of by the decentralized software program and its related token.

Wrapped Bitcoin — WBTC

“Wrapped” bitcoins (WBTC): A way of sending Bitcoin to the Ethereum network so the Bitcoin can be used directly in Ethereum’s DeFi system. WBTCs allow users to earn interest on the bitcoin they lend out via the decentralized lending platforms described above.

Supply of Tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum Now Tops $1.4 Billion

Celsius is a company offering amazing APY for your crypto.

They also have super low interests rates if you want to borrow money.

As you can see, this could be a game changer in a world where most banks give you .09%

And let me remind you, that savings continues to lose value as central banks continuously print trillion and trillions….the hidden tax of inflation.

Eth 2.0

Ethereum is prepping for a highly anticipated upgrade in November 2020.

The goal of the upgrade is to enable the chain to scale its speed to handle significantly more transactions volume to match that of Visa and other major payment processors.

The upgrade has the potential to dramatically raise the awareness and adoption and trigger the next wave of new buyers into the space.

Proof-of-Work vs Proof-of-Stake

Bitcoin has a proof-of-work (PoW) method that requires “miners” to validate transactions on the chain. This is a costly, power-hungry method which is secure but not scalable. Proof-of-stake (PoS) serves a similar purpose of validating transactions, but it’s far more energy-efficient and enables everyday people to help validate the network using a computer as simple as their home laptop.

Essentially, proof-of-stake asks users to lock their invested Ethereum into the network. By doing so, these users become validators, which serve a similar purpose to miners, only without the need for expensive hardware, opening up the network to more people.

On Ethereum 2.0, users must stake a minimum of 32 ETH ($13,000 as of October) to become a validator. Based on the number of ETH staked on the network, validators can earn 14% APY. The high yield is an incentive for more people to stake their ETH at the beginning and help secure the network. The more people that join, the lower the yield will become.

It pays to get in first!

Currently the number of Ethereum wallets, which own 32 or more ETH, is approaching the 120,000 wallet mark.

Experts also expect that the number of staked ETH will continue to increase over time, so that the accumulation trend could continue not only before the launch of Ethereum 2.0, but also afterwards. This would lead to a significant shortage of the ETH in circulation, which in turn could trigger a considerable increase in price.

Ethereum is the second largest blockchain in the world, with 2000 decentralized apps built on it. Numerous companies like Microsoft, Ernst & Young, JP Morgan, Coca-Cola are all leveraging the Ethereum blockchain for their growth into the future. This is the future, it is happening now.

The world of finance is being flipped upside down, with DeFi sparking a whole new ecosystem of peer to peer lending and borrowing.

Finally, over the next year, Ethereum begins its transition from PoW to PoS, compelling many investors to acquire 32ETH in order to reap the staking rewards. Staking creates a new use case as a Digital Bond. Companies need ETH to run the network. DeFi needs ETH to run the transactions. People will lock ETH up to earn their rewards. The demand will drive the price much, much higher…

2021 Price Prediction: $5000-$10,000

Buy some ETH now on Coinbase and participate in this revolution!