With the COVID-19 pandemic, the offline conferences have become obsolete but this has not prevented carrying the online summit. Instead of gathering together, the participants spent the two-day online conference.
Pandemic has pushed blockchain developers to speeding up.
One of the basic points was the conversation between Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin and the Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz. Major part of the Summit was devoted to how COVID-19 has changed the reality for the two leading cryptos and the corresponding networks. Apparently, the pandemic has accelerated the acceptance of Bitcoins and developing of Ethereum 2.0. Decentralized protocols. Lubin, who is currently the head of ConsenSys, explained that coronavirus has become a catalyst for developers of decentralized protocols pushing them to new solutions and actions. He told that before the economic crisis he expected that central banks will ‘go further’ after a while. But COVID-19 has changed it all. When they ask whether the technology is ready for prime-time the blockchain pioneers are evasive.
Novogratz stated there was no final decision on this. As an example he mentioned Facebook and its Libra project saying that it would be better to build Libra system on the basis of decentralized network like Ethereum. As for Bitcoin, once it is used as ‘digital gold’, this makes it a finished product. Since BTC was a first crypto ever, it rightfully has the highest value and can serve as a store of value. But not all the projects were just as successful.
“The rest of crypto space projects will not be finished neither next year or next month. The industry is gaining traction but the real changes will take 2, 3, 4, 5 years… If we said we would switch to full decentralization tomorrow, the system would collapsed”, noted Novogratz.
The experts underline that the market of decentralized finances is still very young with an estimated value of $1 billion in comparison with $80 trillion of the world economy.
The Galaxy Digital CEO also mentioned that “the biggest stable coin used in the world over the four years will be the stable coin tied to dollar”. Still there is a chance of that dollar would loose its reserve status. Lubin hoped that the technology completion may take much more time but the developers hardly can afford to wait. He insists that they are ready for prime-time although it’s not a ‘common tendency’.
“If you are primary commodities trading financing consortium, you should be ready for prime-time job as now you can collaborate with organizations you could only compete instead of creating a reliable infrastructure based on a protocol. Your project should be absolutely ready to get closer to 1 million of developers in the wide blockchain ecosystem, developers who are well versed in technologies”, underlined Lublin. New Ethereum upgrade is very complex. The crypto industry is eagerly waiting for Ethereum 2.0 release.
Despite it would take not less than several years until the update is be completed, the developers have already reached significant progress, and, as Novogratz says, ‘these are the Herculean efforts that are being made. Finally, this will be great for the ETH price. As more and more solutions are built on the initial ETH, this will drive the crypto’s cost up. It doesn’t have to skyrocket but it should be constantly rising to inspire the community’. As Lubin further explained, Ethereum 1.0 is being merged with the 2.0 version and will be integrated in a few phases. Importantly, it would become useful since the very moment of the implementation. Ethereum 2.0 will establish a huge PoS system showing that there is something really valued that can work with near-zero electricity expenditures. This would be something extremely powerful.
