Ethereum price is surging and on March 13, it reached its all-time high market cap of $2.74 bln. Analysts are attributing the rising trend of Ethereum price to the community’s demand for cheaper, faster, more flexible and a developer-friendly network.
Since early 2016, Ethereum developers have been criticizing Bitcoin due to its limited functionalities and restricted flexibility in comparison to the Ethereum network. Bitcoin experts including Litecoin creator and Coinbase Director of Engineering Charlie Lee argued that a network can’t be flexible, cheap and efficient without compromising security.
As seen in late 2016, when Ethereum underwent four consequent hard forks, the consequence for prioritizing flexibility and functionality over security was quite evident. One of the hard forks designed to bail out investors in the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) led to a split chain, which the community feared, creating Ethereum Classic.
However, as the Bitcoin Blockchain became more congested and an increasing number of transactions started to get delayed for up to 48 hours, developers, users and businesses began to seek out for alternative networks to use. The majority of users that searched for other altcoins or alternative networks migrated to Ethereum.
More developer friendly?
According to Iuri Matias, the developer of Embark, a framework for Ethereum Dapps, there are currently more developers working on Ethereum and its infrastructure in contrast to Bitcoin. Matias emphasized in a series of statements that more developers are working for or with Ethereum because of its flexibility.
Hudson Jameson, Blockchain consultant and a developer for the Ethereum Foundation noted that the Ethereum Foundation alone has over 60 volunteers or full-time employees and 50 of those individuals are developers. While the Bitcoin community has 416 contributors, Matias stated that if only core infrastructure developers are concerned, the Ethereum network as a larger development community.
Bitcoin companies like Purse, a Bitcoin marketplace known for its Amazon discounts and Bitcoin peer-to-peer merchants platform, are developing frameworks like BCoin, which allow developers to code applications for an alternative implementation of the Bitcoin protocol written in node.js. As it is javascript-based, it is more friendly towards app developers focusing on user experience.
John Lilic, a member of the Ethereum decentralized application production studio ConsenSys and founder of the Afghanistan-based coding school Code to Inspire, further emphasized that transactions are cheaper within the Ethereum network.
Lilic wrote:
“Transferring $2 mln worth of eth in under a minute for less than $0.01 in fees. More reasons why Ethereum [is better].”
Since transaction fee within the Bitcoin network varies greatly depending on the size of the transaction, costs for some transactions could go over $1 in some cases. Within the Ethereum network, however, most transactions are identical in fees.
Experts and analysts argue that Ethereum transactions will become expensive in the future if it confronts scalability issues even remotely similar to the Bitcoin networks. Until that time comes, it seems as if the Ethereum network will grow larger in size, in terms of user base, the development community and market cap.