During an interview on First on CNBC, Ethereum co-creator Joseph Lubin, the founder, and CEO of blockchain software studio ConsenSys, said that the price drop of ether, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum, makes sense and that the network itself is in great shape.
Co-Creator Speaks About Ether
Lubin, who has led a group of over 600 software developers at ConsenSys to build infrastructure on the Ethereum network primarily to fuel the deployment and adoption of decentralized applications (dapps), stated that despite the price fall of ether from $1,500 to $430, the ecosystem and industry are performing at their highest level.
Specifically, Lubin noted the initiation of the “phase two” of Ethereum development, with focus set on the improvement of layer-two blockchain solutions such as Plasma and Sharding, is expected to drastically improve the capacity of the Ethereum blockchain network.
Lubin said:
“[ETH] price started at $0.20 to $0.25 a few years ago, it surged quite dramatically, and it makes a lot of sense that general fear greed dynamics tend to cause overshoots and corrections, and so we’re in great shape. We’re in great shape because we’re building excellent things and we’re moving into an era of scalability for the Ethereum network.”
Moving to Scalability
Plasma and Sharding have been the main focus of developers in the open-source community of Ethereum and independent blockchain software development firms like ConsenSys. Because the two-layer solutions leverage the base layer of Ethereum, or the main chain, as a trust layer to process information with significant capacity and efficiency, they have the potential to potentially increase the transaction per second capacity of Ethereum to millions of transactions per second, as Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin previously noted.
Essentially, Plasma on Ethereum operates similarly as Lightning on Bitcoin but with multi-blockchain networks that enable small blockchains to perform simultaneously to process as many transactions as possible on a regular basis.
Plasma is one example of a side chain mechanism that has achieved sufficient progress to be implemented in the upcoming months, possibly by the end of 2018. As the developer community of Ethereum continues to focus its resources on the improvement of layer-two infrastructure, Lubin emphasized that an influx of innovative Ethereum-based technologies will emerge in the near future.
Price Draws Attention and it is Good
Regarding the highly volatile price action of ether and every other major digital asset such as bitcoin, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash, Lubin explained that volatility, both in the upside and downside, draw attention from the public to Ethereum and the rest of the blockchain ecosystem, and this is positive.
In bear markets, developers have less pressure to showcase deployment-ready infrastructure to meet increasing demand from users in a speedy manner. In bull markets, most of the attention of the finance and technology sector is shifted to the blockchain industry so newly built infrastructure, dapps, and solutions can be adopted, embraced, and utilized by millions of users.