Ethereum 2019 half a year: out of the cold winter, towards the bustling

Abstract: The main network transaction has exceeded 500 million mark, and the number of core agreement developers is far ahead…

Before the advent of Libra, in addition to Bitcoin, the C-bit of the currency circle was Ethereum. At present, the market value of Ethereum is still behind Bitcoin, ranking second in the world. For the first time, the concept of Ethereum was inspired by Bitcoin by programmer Vitalik Buterin from 2013 to 2014. The idea was “the next generation of cryptocurrency and decentralized application platform”, which was developed through ICO crowdfunding in 2014.

Since 2019, Ethereum has also gone out of the winter with Bitcoin. The price of the coin has risen by more than 50% and is smashing at $207. On July 22nd, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the ETF's crowdfunding pre-sale, the media of the blockchain technology company ConsenSys released the report on the development of Ethereum 2019 in the first half of the year. From the results of Ethereum in the first half of this year, the company and the government were discussed. The exploration and achievements of investment institutions in the blockchain world.

In the past six months, the Ethereum main network handled 130 million transactions, boosting the total number of transactions by more than 500 million, and the network utilization rate was stable at 90%. There are more than 70 million unique addresses on Ethereum, of which 16 million (16%) were created since the beginning of this year. Of all the categories and platforms, 44 (88%) of the top 50 most active developer events were based on Ethereum. In addition, the number of active developers per month in Ethereum is 216, and the number of core protocol developers is far ahead of other cryptocurrencies.

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It is worth mentioning that the prosperity of Ethereum is a microcosm of the blockchain world.

In the first half of this year, enterprises are still pioneers in the exploration of blockchain technology. They promote the development of the blockchain industry through investment and R&D innovation, and provide more opportunities for decentralized technology. In particular, Facebook launched the Libra white paper in June, bringing cryptocurrencies back to the center of public opinion.

Governments are also eager to try the doorchain world. Developed countries dominated by the United States and Europe are constantly making "first movers" and do not miss the window period and development dividend that blockchain technology may bring.

The global venture capital institutions are constantly adding blockchain industry. In April this year, Reuters reported that, by 2019, venture capital institutions have invested nearly $1 billion (approximately $850 million) in blockchain startups, making today's wind investment in the entire ecosystem expected to exceed 2018. A record annual record of $2.4 billion.

Looking ahead, Ethereum 2.0 has set sail and is heading from PoW's Old World to PoS's new continent; and the blockchain world is becoming more exciting.

The following is the full text:

Five years ago, more precisely, on July 22, 2014, Ethereum went online in the form of crowdfunding. The various interest groups related to Ethereum, including the years of passion for developers, start-ups, and entrepreneurs. After five years, the blockchain ecosystem has not only become more diverse, globalized, decentralized, but also has a good performance in terms of importance, leadership, and visibility.

The blockchain ecology has experienced a hot and cold winter in 2018, and the price of cryptocurrencies has also fallen from a record high in 2018. In 2019, although the market is still fluctuating, the industry will continue to usher in a strong, stable and growing ecosystem. Especially for Ethereum, 2019 means more vitality, absorbing power and continuous improvement.

So far, 2019 has been so beautiful, and in 2019 it has only been halfway through.

Ethereum's development since this year

Since its inception, the Ethereum main network has processed more than 500 million transactions; in 2019 alone, it has processed 130 million transactions, and the network utilization rate has stabilized at 90% on average. The number of unique Ethereum addresses exceeded 70 million, of which 16 million unique addresses were created this year.

On June 1, there were 616,000 active addresses on the Ethereum, which was the busiest day of the first half of 2019. The total supply of ETH is 106 million, with an average of 2.28 ETH per address. If the first 500 addresses calculated by ETH ownership (37% of the total supply) are not included, the average ETH holding per address is 1.43 ETH.

In February, Ethereum upgraded Constantinople, a hard fork in the plan to improve the network and bring it closer to the final milestone of Ethereum, Serenity. A major change with Serenity is that Ethereum's blockchain consensus algorithm will shift from proof of work (PoW) to proof of interest (PoS). The upgrade to Constantinople incorporates five different improvements (EIP). It is worth noting that EIP 1234 reduced the block reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH. This development is also known as The Thirdening (half the third block award of Ethereum).

Enterprises are the pioneers of the blockchain world

In the economic society, enterprises have always been the pioneers in the use of blockchain. They are especially large companies that promote the development of the blockchain industry through investment, R&D innovation, proof of concepts experiments and partnerships, and provide more opportunities for decentralized technology. This year, we have seen corporate events with the theme of “Focus on privacy”.

Libra's declaration of birth reveals people's yearning for data privacy, even if the declaration itself is full of ideology, supervision and technology considerations. In April, ConsenSys' Pegasys Tech team launched a new enterprise Ethereum client, Pantheon 1.1, to implement Orion as a privacy transaction manager, specifically addressing corporate privacy concerns. In May, Ernst & Young (EY) launched Nightfall, a free software designed to help corporate customers use the Ethereum blockchain. It is distributed on Github in an open source format, enabling standard ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens to be "completely private" on the Ethereum blockchain.

In addition, consulting companies and research institutions have fully affirmed the efficient exploration of the company in the blockchain world. In June, a report by consulting analyst Gartner predicted that by 2025, the blockchain would add $176 billion worth of value to the company, and by 2030, the blockchain would add $3.1 trillion in value to the business. Of this increase of $3.1 trillion, less than $1 trillion was created by internal improvements.

In 2018, Deloitte interviewed 1,000 executives who focused on blockchain development, and their content was about the imagination of 2019 and beyond. According to a written report, 95% of entrepreneurs plan to invest in blockchain technology in 2019; nearly 40% of entrepreneurs plan to invest $5 million; 84% of entrepreneurs believe that the blockchain is ultimately scalable, and Mainstream applications will be realized; 39% of entrepreneurs believe that blockchain technology is “over-hyped”. Corporate executives from the automotive, oil and gas, and life sciences sectors are most optimistic about the blockchain, followed by financial services.

From a general trend, corporate executives are cautiously exploring the blockchain world and are looking at the opportunities offered by decentralized technologies. Wall Street investment bank – Goldman Sachs is an example. The bank has quietly posted a job posting to attract a “digital asset project manager” to the internal incubator project.

Governments are also eager to try

In 2019, governments around the world have moved from investing in exploration blockchain projects to launching their own pilot projects. This approach is designed to modernize the operations of current government departments. In Europe, the Luxembourg government supports the development of its own blockchain start-ups through projects such as Mind&Market, Horizon 2020, Lhoft, Letzblock, and LuxInnovation. Germany funded related projects through the local blockchain lobby group Bundesverband. The Swiss government funds the blockchain project through its Blockchain Federation.

At present, Europe is at the forefront of the development of the world blockchain. Twenty-nine of the 44 European countries have signed the European Blockchain Partnership Agreement and will cooperate to establish the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (ESBI). Governments in other countries around the world are exploring blockchain-based initiatives to explore solutions for localization of blockchain: a team in Georgia, USA, is using blockchain technology to simplify the framework for land registration; Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, cooperates with Alibaba Hope to create the first blockbuster “medical block”; the Australian government uses blockchain technology to help domestic exporters track the supply of sugar products.

Dozens of central and local banks are also actively approaching blockchain technology to improve the efficiency of dealing with difficult problems. Among them, UBP is promoting its i2i (island-to-island) blockchain program to address high remittance costs. The Brazilian central bank used blockchain technology to develop a project SALT for interbank payments and a decentralized information exchange platform, Project PIER. The Bank of Thailand, the South African Central Bank and the Monetary Authority of Singapore have used the digital currency issued by the Central Bank (CBDC) to create a project to study alternatives to today's systems. At the end of 2018, the World Bank also launched the first block-chain-based bond “bond-i” to raise $110 million. This marks the first time that investors can fully manage their activities using blockchain technology.

The steps of the United States are getting bigger. The country is developing laws and regulations to manage “mining behavior”. In February of this year, the governor of Wyoming signed the HB0070 law, authorizing the Secretary of State to develop and implement a blockchain-based file system for corporate entities and business documents; in March 2019, the Governor of South Dakota signed the HB1196 Act to provide blocks for specific purposes. The definition of chain technology; Arkansas also signed the HB 1944 Act, which stipulates that the contract containing the terms of the smart contract related to the transaction cannot be denied its legal validity, validity or enforceability.

Generally speaking, government departments tend to take half a shot in catching up with the trend of innovation, but we still expect that more and more countries in the world will explore the world of blockchain.

Venture capital institutions are constantly adding

Despite the fluctuating price of cryptocurrencies, venture capital has not stopped flowing to many projects and development teams, and these teams are building some more exciting decentralized applications (Dapps). In April this year, Reuters reported that, by 2019, venture capital institutions have invested nearly $1 billion (approximately $850 million) in blockchain startups, making today's wind investment in the entire ecosystem expected to exceed 2018. A record annual record of $2.4 billion. In 2018, the record investment amounted from 117 venture capitales, and this year's investment of 850 million US dollars came from only 13 venture capitales, which indicates that the investment amount of each transaction has increased, and it also indicates that the venture capital institution is in the district. Blockchain technology is more assured.

The report pointed out that VCs do not directly enter the cryptocurrency and other fields, which means that venture capital institutions are still hesitant to enter the trading market. In the near future, we may continue to see that such high-risk investments remain in the area of ​​individual traders and high-risk private funds. Instead, venture capital will flow to projects and teams that support ecosystem growth. In other words, Reuters mentioned that tokenization is one of the main interests of venture capital institutions in terms of the potential of decentralized technology.

The “friend circle” of Ethereum developers is getting more and more popular.

In March 2019, Electric Capital released a developer report that tracks the distribution of developers across major blockchain platforms across the cryptocurrency ecosystem. To date, Ethereum has the largest number of core protocol developers, with Bitcoin and Cardano ranking second and third.

In addition to core protocol development, Ethereum has 216 active developers working on all code developments every month. The number of developers in Ethereum continued to grow strongly, with an average of 240 active developers in January 2019, an increase of 23% compared to 180 in 2018.

Ethereum is also very prominent in all code projects, with code submissions eight times more than Bitcoin and 20 times more than XRP.

The Ethereum development framework Truffle Suite provides a powerful set of tools for developing dApps and smart contracts. Since its launch in May 2015, Truffle has been downloaded more than 2 million times. Ganache is the second product developed with Truffle. It is a private Ethereum blockchain client for developers that can be used to deploy, develop, test, and test code locally. Since its release in October 2017, the number of downloads of this product has reached 1227,844, and in June 2019, the number of downloads reached 79,546.

Battle of Dapp: Ethereum leads too much

From the early days of the blockchain, the Ethereum community has been competing to create a “killer Dapp” ​​that becomes a global utility and proves that one protocol is better than another. But to a large extent, the current state of mind has faded. Few agreements are expected to expand globally, as is Dapp based on the agreement. Instead, the Dapp industry has evolved into a cluster of both early and more mature projects, all of which are dig deep into Dapp's use cases to meet the greatest demands, achieve the best UX and maintain optimal security. Broadly speaking, in the past year, financial Dapp (including exchanges, DeFi, etc.) has become the focus of Dapp developers.

Of the top 50 Dapps ranked by Dapp status (ranked based on "Multiple factors including active users, tx volume, developer activity, CTR, and user recommendations"), 29 Dapps are based on Ethereum.

Of the top 50 financial Dapps, 42 are based on Ethereum, including MakerDAO and OmiseGO.

Of the top 50 exchange-like Dapps, 44 are based on Ethereum, including Augur and Uniswap.

Of the top 50 securities Dapps, 42 are based on Ethereum, including Quantstamp.

Of the top 50 development Dapps, 43 are based on Ethereum, including Kauri, Golem and Cryptozombie. Perhaps most illustratively, of all the categories and platforms, 44 (88%) of the top 50 Dapps with the most active developer activity are based on Ethereum; according to statistics from the State of the Dapps, Ethereum still has the strongest developer community.

Ethereum 2.0 starts: Go to the new continent of PoS

For Ethereum, it is unlikely that the rest of the 2019 period will slow down its growth. In recent weeks, the cryptocurrency market has broken the stagnation and revived the interest of retail and institutional investors. As far as the Ethereum agreement itself is concerned, it is planned to carry out the Istanbul hard fork upgrade in October 2019. The current upgrade for Istanbul contains 11 proposed improvements, which will be the last upgrade to the current Ethereum old chain before the release of Serenity Phase 0.

Serenity Phase 0 (Beacon Chain) is scheduled to start in early 2020. Serenity will undoubtedly become Ethereum as Ethereum core developers and broader ecosystems turn their attention to the realization of PoS and the commitment to enhance Ethereum's expansion. And the blockchain community was hotly discussed in the second half of 2019.

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