Daily Digest 1/4
Insight on the biggest stories of the day.
Ethereum Layer 1 “Not Ready for Direct Mass Adoption”: Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin is best known for being one of the core founders of Ethereum along with former co-founders Charles Hoskinson (Cardano) and Gavin Wood (Polkadot). He is also the youngest billionaire in the world at 27 years old. The one thing that is really holding back his project from being even bigger than it is are the gas fees.
Even Buterin said that Ethereum is not yet ready for mass adoption and addressed the scalability issues currently facing the platform. In a podcast with Bankless DAO he mentions the importance of layer-2 solutions such as Matic or Loopring which will take some of the pressure off of the main Ethereum network. Several other projects like Arbitrum and Optimism are putting all of their resources to helping ETH in this situation.
In the past year, the developers for Ethereum have been working and even released the London hard fork which burns some of the gas fees and makes Ethereum a deflationary token but high gas fees still persist. This is creating a high barrier of entry for retail investors looking to get their feet wet in crypto.
Buterin has also acknowledged that some of these rollup solutions would take years of refinement still. The foundation is still optimistic that 2022 will see an improvement in scaling ability and effectively reduce gas fees. The timeline for this is not clear as ETH 2.0 has been in the works for some time and the launch continues to get moved back.
Uniswap Crosses $1 Billion in Revenue
Uniswap is one of the most popular decentralized applications built on top of Ethereum. Aside from that they are the biggest and most used decentralized exchange in crypto and between October 2020 and October 2021 they have become the first Dapp running on ETH to cross $1 billion in yearly revenue.
Uni currently has a fully diluted market capitalization of $20 billion and even has a price-to-earnings ratio of about 20 based on those numbers. Using Uniswap you can swap any Ethereum based token for another and just based on December’s numbers they did $4.1 billion in trading volume for the month.
There is a lot of competition coming for their market share like the 1inch protocol but Uniswap will always have the first-mover advantage and name recognition. It is also worth mentioning that the growth of these DEXs is hampered by the crazy gas fees mentioned in the previous article. Once that is fixed something like Uniswap will be invaluable to the growth of crypto as a whole.
China’s Digital Yuan Wallet Deployed For iOS And Android, All Set To Launch In 2022?
China has been working quickly on getting their digital Yuan up and running and they have now released their wallet on both the android and iOS operating systems. The project began in 2014 and by the looks of things may be ready to fully roll out sometime this year.
As of right now, anyone can download the wallet to their phone but only select users and institutions will be able to access the CBDC because it is still under development as this is still a pilot test. Before the release of this wallet, China had been airdropping the digital currency to its citizens. It is also speculated that the pilot testing will get a huge boost during the winter Olympics in Beijing where all the competitors will be using it. The US has requested that their athletes be forbidden from using the digital Yuan.
There may not be another country that is as far into the process as China is and that has many trying to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible. The United States is still looking into the framework for a CBDC and countries such as Ukraine and the Bahamas are also actively working on a Central Bank Digital Currency.
While the big players like Bitcoin and Ethereum have been relatively boring in their price movement recently one token that has been standing out is Cosmos Atom. Atom is up about 6% so far on the day and is trading at over $40 a share which is also an all-time high.
The biggest reason for the positive price action on Cosmos is that they are one of the only live blockchains that support interoperability. Interoperability enables blockchains to share and access their data and interoperate with one another. Currently, this is not possible for the most part and that limits the full potential of blockchain.
Cosmos currently has a total market cap of $9.5 billion and is creeping its way into the top 20 on coinmarketcap. Another popular project that is focusing on interoperability is Polkadot which is already in the top 10 by market cap.