Joseph Lubin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, recently appeared on Bloomberg Markets and discussed a range of subjects regarding Ethereum, bitcoin, and the initial coin offering (ICO) market.
Talking to hosts, Julia Chatterley and Scarlet Fu, Lubin dug into the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum, and explained how the two cryptocurrencies can co-exist in the long-term.
Lubin explained that the Ethereum community sees bitcoin as just one application of blockchain technology which is a premier store of value and a currency. He noted that the Ethereum community is more enthusiastic about other applications including the emergence of innovative decentralized applications launched on top of the Ethereum protocol.
“Our world is very exciting. We are not enormous proponents of the bitcoin cryptocurrency. We are happy to see it succeed and breakthrough. The bitcoin application is really just the first application on blockchain. We had Ethereum built a decentralized application platform on a general purpose global world computer blockchain. We are excited about many applications beyond bitcoin,” said Lubin.
Over the past few months, several decentralized applications have achieved significant commercial success, despite the current scalability issues of the Ethereum blockchain network. EtherDelta and CryptoKitties are two examples which have demonstrated the possibility of decentralized asset trading at a large scale by allowing users to freely and seamlessly trade digital assets on a peer-to-peer (P2P) basis.
Lubin explained that in the future, Ethereum will host a wide array of platforms that are capable of creating independent tokenized ecosystems. He added that while some tokens launched on top of Ethereum are subpar, some tokens represent massive potential in terms of utility.
“Some token launches are excellent and represent high quality projects. We’ve issued tokenized securities to fund an independent film, we’ve issued tokens that we believe are utility tokens that would not be characterized by the SEC as securities, and those represent consumer access tokens, they represent tokens that can be used as an Amazon Web Services credit.”
Lubin was optimistic about Bitcoin and Ethereum co-existing in the future, explaining that he see’s bitcoin’s long-term utility as being a store of value and a currency, while Ethereum will operate as a base platform for decentralized applications.
He added that Ether was a more “programmable money,” with which developers can create applications with freedom and flexibility within a decentralized and distributed ecosystem.
“Ether can be a more programmable [form of] money. We conceive it as a crypto fuel because it powers these programs on the world computer. We’re going to see lots of new projects pioneering lots of new techniques. The Ethereum project has been incredibly agile in the incorporation of new technologies. We already have tremendous network effect behind us,” said Lubin.
He also explained that Ethereum currently has the most active developer community in the space, and has 30 times more developers than Fabric, the second most active community.
Historically, as Ivey Business professor JP Vergne’s study has shown, developer activity has been the most accurate predictor of the future of value of a cryptocurrency.
“We found that the best predictor of a cryptocurrency’s exchange rate is the amount of developer activity around it,” wrote Vergne.
Ethereum’s active developer community and the emergence of innovative decentralized applications like CryptoKitties and EtherDelta are optimistic factors that will contribute to positive adoption of Ethereum in the mid to long term.