Ethereum Sees Two Key Developments
All eyes may be focused on Bitcoin right now, but Ethereum (ETH) has seen a number of strong positive developments over recent days and weeks. Just the other day, Binance, one of the world’s largest exchanges, revealed that it would be changing its Tether (USDT) stockpile from Omni (Bitcoin-based system) to the Ethereum blockchain. (For those unaware, USDT exists on four chains simultaneously, these being Omni, Ethereum, Tron, and EOS.)
Binance’s Changpeng “CZ” Zhao told users of his platform last month that as soon as Binance’s ETH-USDT stash outweighed its Omni-USDT stash, it would convert over to the former.
this shows that investors are starting to prefer the faster Ethereum system over Omni, which some say isn’t suited for stablecoin use. And considering that Binance and its customers are some of the largest USDT holders out there, other exchanges and service providers may soon follow suit.
The introduction of an Ethereum-based USDT onto Binance is likely to increase the blockchain’s transactional volume, which is evidently good for those valuing ETH by its fundamentals.
Also, as reported by this outlet previously, the specifications of Phase Zero of Serenity, dubbed “Beacon Chain”, were recently ‘frozen’. This means that much of the upgrade’s changes have been somewhat finalized. Per trade publication CryptoSlate, however, there are still a number of “significant” changes slated to be made to the specifications.
For those unaware, founder of the blockchain Vitailik Buterin claims that Serenity could simply be explained as “a way to bring technical improvements, like PoS and sharding, together to improve the Virtual Machine, Merkle Trees, the efficiency of the protocol, and a whole bunch of small technical things that you have never heard of.” Per the industry insider, this is all being done in a bid to create a “next-generation blockchain” to be hundreds of times faster and scalable than Ethereum’s current iteration.
Not All Fine And Dandy
Not everything is fine and dandy though. The Next Web’s “Hard Fork” column recently revealed that Ethereum’s user count growth is being eclipsed by both EOS and Tron. Data from Dapp.com, a crypto analytics service, suggests that that Ether has around 20% less active users than Tron, but around 20% more than EOS. Also harrowing is the fact that Ethereum application saw a mere 6.04 million transactions in Q2 2019, which is a far cry from the 189.79 million registered by EOS applications.
This isn’t the only worrying sign. As technical analyst Squeezy points out, Ethereum is “on the verge of jumping off a cliff with a descending triangle”, drawing attention to a series of lower highs and failed breakouts on the asset’s chart (seen below).
And as Three Arrow Capital’s Su Zhu adds, this is a result of a discoupling between the correlation of Bitcoin and Ethereum, marked by the 30-day BTC-to-ETH/BTC correlation reaching -73%. Ouch.
Title Image Courtesy of Pixabay.com
