With all the recent hype around Ethereum and the DAO and the even more recent rise in value over the last few days, it seems like a reasonable question to ask if we will ever see a sub Billion market cap for Ethereum. So lets take a look at some of the more important factors that may be influencing this increase and you can give your own opinion.
The DAO becomes the #1 crowdfunded project ever
At the time of writing The Dao had collected the equivalent to over 135 million dollars USD in Ethereum
The DAO has also seen widespread news reports from Bloomberg to The Wall Street Journal and even to CNBC which seemed to tie in with the almost simultaneous increase in the overall value of Ethereum's underlying cryptocurrency. This increase saw over a 35% change in value since just over a week ago.
One of Bitcoin's popular and outspoken figures Andreas Antonopoulos took to twitter on Monday to show his respect at what a monumental achievement this was for not only the cryptocurrency space but for technology in general.
Ethereum's (other) assets are surpassing alternate cryptocurrencies
Recently DigxDAO held a crowdsale to attempt to make 5.5 million to fund the production of their platform. Within 14 hours they had already reached the point where they were forced to halt the crowdsale. Overnight the speculation value of this crypto-asset had surged to over twice the initial value based on demand alone. More recently, DigixDAO overtook the long-standing, albeit satirical, cryptocurrency Dogecoin for nearly 24 hours before settling just below it at $20M market cap.
In addition, another Ethereum-based asset Augur has been hard at work producing their initial platform after raising over 5.3M in their own crowdsale. Augur intends on becoming the defacto standard for crowdsourced and decentralized prediction markets and more recently entered an early beta-test stage.
Ethereum's outstanding development team
After closing the initial crowdsale for Ethereum and generating their $18.4M of seed money the Ethereum development team began the long battle to build and release what could be one of the most recognized pieces of software ever. It was not without hardships of all types including: accusations of fraud, being called vaporware, or even having all discussions removed from popular bitcoin websites. That was soon to all change...
Frontier Release
On July 30th the day that may had stated would never happen had finally come. Ethereum celebrated it's first days with a few hiccups but no major problems. Much of this was to do with the amazing development team and their tenacity over the previous year. At this point most people that had purchased as part of the crowdsale had seen their investment triple.
Homestead Release
After many months of testing and bug fixes the first official "safe" release of the Ethereum team's software was released on February 29th, 2016. The release, nicknamed "Homestead" was soon adopted by even more investors and new faces. Not long after the Homestead release the Ethereum community was surprised by their first big boom. The price of Ethereum increased from the initial crowdsale price of $.33 to an astounding $15 at the peak while also surpassing the $1B market cap that was deemed not possible by many.
Beyond
With a diligent and present development team and a loyal group of supporters Ethereum has continued to surprise not only the cryptocurrency community but investors from all walks of life. I encourage each and every reader of this article to not blindly just take my word for it, explore the software and read as much as you can on the technology. Visit the friendly and helpful communities of /r/Ethereum and r/Ethtrader and see what all the commotion is about!
*At the time of writing this article Ethereum had a price of $12.74 USD.
"Never again" is a strong opinion in a fragile space. The arguments that you bring on the table are clearly not suited to exclude such a scenario under all or even likely circumstances. Even more, a below 1 Billion scenario is now just 37,701,150+1 USD marketcap away. So say what you really want to say: "TO THE MOON!!".
It is an opinionated piece, and with that I agree that there is always a chance of it dropping off the face of the earth (or back to where it was a month ago). I really just believe that we are still in the early phases and have really only seen one bubble and as a second one forms the high after the crash may just be well above the current marketcap.
Also, side question. I thought that downvotes were reserved for spam and articles blatantly breaking the rules. Is this not the case?
@hbhades, I don't know who invented this strange 'downvotes rule', but yes I've heard about it. It's like saying if you don't agree please abstain from saying "No", just be quiet. In the good old times, there were 'flags' for spammers and trolls and nobody had to explain the rules.
In all honesty with Steemit being a smaller community at this time, your downvote is much more powerful and with that it should be used with caution. It removes the incentives of users bringing original content to the site (even if that content is opinionated). I intended only on starting a conversation with a bold statement.
Why would a user want to post content that is opinionated and may get a mix of up and downvotes and thus be worth nothing and get buried? While another user spams upvote worthy reposts and makes a profit?
I understand there is a problem. But the solution could not be to change the audience of your post but the rules how profits are calculated. A controversal piece is of high value in the spectator economy. if Steemit doesn't accept this, it's by all means their fault, but don't blame me that I will continue to vote with my mouse.
There went that. ;)
Nice blog. Interesting to see I'm not the only one that is thinking about this. Investing in cryptos is still a risky thing. We really need more insights in the market and previous investment results. I found this great website: https://www.coincheckup.com The best crypto analysis site by far. Complete in depth investment analysis.
I think it will drop below $1B within 72 hours.
That vanishes quickly in crypto-world. Within days an event, unwise choice of words from a Dev or just about anything the herd consider "baaaaaad" can quickly turn that loyal group of supporters into a group of speculators that want to get out at the highest price possible.
Yeah, that's not going to happen now that the Coinbase news is out.