The Future of Ethereum

The Future of Ethereum

It’s been an epic couple of years for Ethereum, from being the platform of choice during the ICO mania of 2017 to unique Ethereum addresses increasing from ~13,000,000 (December 2017) to now over 50,000,000 (January 2019). According to this CCN article, 94 out of the top 100 blockchain projects have launched on top of the Ethereum network, now boasting a community of over 250,000 developers.

With the Ethereum Constantinople fork coming soon, 2019 promises to be an even better year. The forthcoming upgrade will hopefully introduce multiple new EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) to increase the efficiency and flexibility of the Ethereum Platform. It’s a necessary upgrade to pave the way for Ethereum’s widely anticipated scaling roadmap over the next few years. So just what has Ethereum achieved and what does the future hold?

Due to government censorship and myriad other reasons, decentralized applications have grown in importance over the past 10 years. Founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, saw this as an opportunity to create a network that would reduce costs, points of failure and prevent censorship, whilst at the same time increasing transparency and trust for applications. Ethereum was the first cryptocurrency to introduce a Smart Contract framework, giving the ability to self-execute contracts between multiple parties with no middleman.

Smart Contracts gave birth to a whole new ecosystem in the cryptocurrency space, allowing people to build trustless and transparent financial applications, cryptographically secure property and contract management, as well as social networks and messaging systems where the users control their own data and much more. As each year goes by, we become less trusting in centralised organisations — take for instance Facebook and the privacy/data security issues that have recently occurred.

In this year or the next, Ethereum will integrate sharding into the protocol. Sharding is the process of splitting data into shards so that small pieces of data can be processed by multiple nodes rather than those nodes all processing the full data. This will help increase the number of transactions that can be processed each second. Some predict that Ethereum should be able to exceed 1,000 transactions each second post-sharding; the more transactions per second, the better the user experience and capacity of DApps.

This year will definitely be interesting for Ethereum, not only because of the software upgrades but due to the increase of DApps and projects with a friendly UI/UX that people could use in their day-to-day life. We all remember crypto kitties, right? Well, crypto kitties showed us that the market is hungry for well-made DApps that aren’t just dice rolls or another generic gambling app.

I believe that 2019/2020 will be the year of the dApp or ‘Dawn of the Dapps’. We aim to grow with Ethereum, driving mass adoption through our sports and entertainment platform Socios.com, which helps fans influence their favourite sports & esports teams.