This week on Ethereum and the increase development in ICOs (Bancor, TenX, Status)

The value of Ethereum has risen 4,500 percent since the beginning of the year. Many people believe that Ethereum’s success can be credited to it’s smart contract feature. A smart contract is basically just a program that runs on a blockchain but it has some exciting potential to reduce the risk and cost to interacting with other people. Smart contract transactions trigger data reads and writes, while also having the capability of doing complex computations.

The question on some people’s mind is whether or not the rise of ICOs and Ethereum’s tremendous growth are directly related? The answer is HELL yes! ICOs are the newest new thing. Before I go any further I must note that before 2013 there were less than a handful of Cryptocurrencies in existence-- with Bitcoin as the poster child. Today on Coinmarketcap.com there are more than 800 cryptocurrencies and other digital assets listed. Let me not forget to mention that in the last year and a half there has been more than a 50 percent increase on the number of cryptographic assets on Coinmarketcap.com.

The concept of ICOs to fund a kickstarter in the crypto-world is fairly new! Instead what these blockchain asset creators had to do was hold a certain amount of their newly created cryptocurrency. Once the coin hit the market and earned a value for itself the developers were able to trade their newly created blockchain asset for Bitcoin or fiat.

The more of these coins started to pop up, ICO fundraising started to become the option of choice. What this meant for developers is that now they were able to trade their future cryptography in return for cryptocurrencies that already existed. Fast Forward to the last year and the Ethereum Blockchain went from zero percent of ICO fundraising, to present day more than 50 percent of all closed and announced ICO fundraising.

ICOs are allowing technological growth in blockchain technologies. They are expediting and empowering developers in their quest for innovation. Ethereum’s use of smart contracts have allowed tremendous transformation in the crypto-world. In the past couple of weeks alone Bancor project raised over $150 million and Status raised more than $100 million thanks to their ICO fundraising with Ethereum.

Although speculators see problems with Ethereum’s failure to process thousands of transaction, ICOs aren’t slowing down anytime soon. With millions of dollars entering the Ethereum blockchain in short periods of time, Ethereum’s backlogs have caused delays in transactions for users. People are optimistic that Ethereum will fix this problem. Either with scaling or sharding no one can really says right now. This has not scared new ICOs from using the Ethereum blockchain. In fact this Saturday the next highly anticipated ICO, TenX, will try to make a debut as grand as Bancor and Status.