Ethereum Will Be Worth $1,000 in Couple of Years: Aragon Co-Founder

Fred Ehrsam, Coinbase co-founder, has said at Y Combinator Demo Day 2017, an annual event held by one of the most prominent and leading venture capital firms, that only two startups out of 130 are building Blockchain-inspired products.

It has become quite evident that demand towards Blockchain technology and Blockchain-based applications from the global technology industry has increased significantly over the past two years.

Multi-billion dollar technology conglomerates and financial institutions including Visa, Microsoft and IBM are actively hiring Blockchain developers to successfully deploy decentralized infrastructures in their existing networks.

A shortage of Blockchain talents

However, there is a shortage of Blockchain developers and experts within the technology space because as Luis Cuende, the co-founder of Aragon, an Ethereum startup that raised over $30 mln in 1.5 minutes through its initial coin offering (ICO), noted, there aren’t many Blockchain developers that are not millionaires yet.

Through ICOs, Blockchain startups and developers can easily raise money in a transparent and open market from a wider range of investors in a shorter period of time with fewer conditions.

“I don't know any good Ethereum developer that isn't a millionaire, and it's only a matter of time before it will become a gold rush among developers to learn the technology,” said Cuende.

Ethereum price can reach $1,000

More to that, in consideration of the rapid rise in popularity of ICOs, Cuende explained that he sees Ether price, the native token of Ethereum, rising to $1,000 in the mid-term.

“I thought it was expensive one year ago when it was at 13 dollars, but today when I see the possibilities created by the technology, I think it's cheap. I believe Ethereum will be worth $1,000 in a couple of years,” he added.

Conceptually, an ICO is a phenomenal, efficient and practical method for startups and developers to use in raising capital to fund their projects.

Not only do ICOs allow startups to secure investment in shorter timeframes, but it also provides a real-time valuation to the software being developed.

For instance, the market cap of Blockchain startups that successfully conducted their ICOs including EOS, TenX and IOTA can be publicly accessed on cryptocurrency market data and analytics platforms such as CoinMarketCap.

It is significantly easier and simpler for Blockchain developers and projects to test the open market rather than collaborating with a small group of venture capital firms and angel investors that will inevitably pressure Blockchain projects for lack of high-profit margins and stable revenues.

Hyperledger Blockchain Consortium Reveals Hybrid 'Sawtooth Ethereum' Tech

Ethereum developers could soon have another way to build enterprise-grade implementations of the open-source technology.

Revealed today on Hyperledger's website, a proof-of-concept called Sawtooth Ethereum, or "Seth" for short, has been completed. The proof-of-concept looks to enable the use of ethereum smart contracts on Hyperledger Sawtooth, Intel's addition to the Linux-led consortium's code.

And while the technological hybrid has technological implications, Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, chose to describe it more broadly as a success for the consortium itself.

Behlendorf told CoinDesk:

"[Hyperledger] isn't just a collection of farm animals in one big barn. There really is a point to bringing these communities together and having them work out organically how they might sit on top of one another and be components into a broader architectural vision."

Other open-source frameworks within Hyperledger include Hyperledger Fabric, contributed by IBM; Hyperledger Iroha, contributed by Soramitsu; and Hyperledger Indy, contributed by the Sovrin Foundation.

Elsewhere, there's other evidence to suggest Sawtooth Ethereum is proof that Hyperledger is growing organically in the way Behlendorf described.

Hyperledger Sawtooth’s interchangeable consensus mechanism enabled the platform to be more easily integrated with Burrow, Monax’s implementation of the ethereum virtual machine.

Because of this integration, ethereum developers with existing smart contracts are expected to be able to "transition their work to the Hyperledger Sawtooth platform" eventually, according to the blog post on the launch.

Monax co-founder, Casey Kuhlman, said in the post:

"Hyperledger Burrow has long been positioned to provide a core EVM that would then be utilized by other Hyperledger projects. This integration validates that positioning, and establishes a strong upstream-downstream relationship between the Sawtooth and Burrow projects."

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a worldwide cryptocurrency and digital payment system invented by an unknown programmer, or a group of programmers, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto It was released as open-source software in 2009.

The system is peer-to-peer, and transactions take place between users directly, without an intermediary. These transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Since the system works without a central repository or single administrator, bitcoin is called the first decentralized digital currency.

Besides being created as a reward for mining, bitcoin can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services in legal or black markets.

As of February 2015, over 100,000 merchants and vendors accepted bitcoin as payment  According to research produced by Cambridge University in 2017, there are 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin