Despite Evidence to the Contrary, Joseph Lubin Claims Ethereum Adoption Growing
December 8, 2018 by Paul de Havilland
Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys claims Ethereum adoption is growing rapidly. Is he looking at the same metrics as everyone else?
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Ethereum Adoption Boom? A Bit Too Much Lube on That
Joseph Lubin is bullish on Ethereum’s future, and so he should be. Founder of the world’s largest blockchain software development company, Lubin, along with Vitalik Buterin was central to the development of Ethereum, the smart contract and decentralized app platform aiming to be an improvement on bitcoin in terms of capabilities and sophistication.
Lubin recently lauded activity on the Ethereum network:
“Blockchain is more than a market. It’s a movement. Market cap doesn’t reflect activity. Decentralized networks are growing. 10 billion daily API requests served by Infura. 1 million Truffle downloads. 1 million MetaMask downloads. 12,000 live Ethereum nodes. 48 million unique Ethereum addresses. 3 times LinkedIn blockchain job openings.”
Three times the number of LinkedIn job openings is not in any way a direct measure of Ethereum adoption, so we’ll leave that aside. The rest of Lubin’s analytics of Ethereum growth don’t speak necessarily to increasing recent adoption so much as to adoption of Ethereum since its inception in July of 2015. Over three years ago.
The Real State of the DApps
A look at Ethereum platform activity on State of the DApps paints a decidedly bleak picture. The most used DApp on Ethereum currently is IDEX, a “distributed exchange made of smart contracts”. At press time, its usage was up 25 percent over the previous 24 hours: to less than 1,500 users worldwide.
CryptoKitties, the DApp that brought the Ethereum network to its knees in December last year, is ranked 6th in unique users–at around 400. At one point, it represented 12 percent of Ethereum usage.
??? DUE TO CONGESTION ON THE NETWORK WE ARE INCREASING THE BIRTHING FEE FROM 0.002 ETH –> 0.015 ETH. WE HOPE THIS WILL ALLOW MORE KITTENS TO BE BORN ON TIME AS THERE HAVE BEEN SIGNIFICANT DELAYS ???
DETAILS: https://t.co/dCXyDIrT1f
— CryptoKitties (@CryptoKitties) December 4, 2017
CryptoKitties is just ahead of Etheremon, another trivial and fruitless use of blockchain technology.
The seven-day volume of DApp activity across Ethereum, EOS, and Ethereum sidechain POA has three EOS-based DApp’s dominating the rankings. Bet Dice, EOSBet Dice, and EOS Poker. No prizes for guessing these are all gambling applications.
If these serious blockchain platforms continue to struggle to move beyond hosting gambling and Tamagotchi breeding games, Buterin might awaken to an existential crisis. A deeply serious-minded individual, the idea that he has given birth to a platform used primarily to let people gamble and breed digital cats is one he would surely find difficult to fathom.
CryptoKitties continues to be a prodigious gas burner–still the seventh most active Ethereum contract by gas burned. Ethereum’s second most prominent use case to date is hosting ICOs, which are becoming scarcer as the crypto community awakens to the reality that 81 percent of them have been scams.
Joseph Lubin Does Make One Valid Point
If Lubin’s actual agenda is to get people focused not on the price of ether but on its potential to disrupt the centralized environment of the digital world, then his message is on point. Trading at around $100 USD, ether is down from highs of around $1,500.
Yet potential is one thing–achieving that potential is another. Breeding digital animals and gambling online are hardly awe-inspiring heights to which blockchain creators ought to be in pursuit of.
Have your say. Was Joseph Lubin being too optimistic about Ethereum’s current achievements?
Images via Pixabay
