By
Steve Muchoki
April 24th, 2024
Vitalik Buterin gives a logical explanation saying not just ‘euphoria’ but ‘actual usage’ will support the future growth of digital currencies.
Earlier this week, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin spoke about the future of cryptocurrency during his interview at the Industry Summit conference in Hong Kong. Buterin said that as the cryptocurrency buzzword has spread everywhere, the euphoric growth as seen in last few years may not be possible soon. He said: “There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.”
Of course, Buterin’s words were not received with ease, resulting in a community backlash of cryptocurrency investors. In a series of responses to CCN sharing this article on Twitter, The Ethereum creator was criticized for his understanding of economics and crypto price movements. You can read some of the responses to the Twitter thread below:
Ethereum Creator Believes Days of 1000x Crypto Growth is Gone https://t.co/dQFTIeAjX4
— CCN – Capital & Celeb News (@CapitalAndCeleb) September 9, 2018
Vitalik Buterin Issues Clarification
Buterin was quick to respond to all the criticism and backlash thrown at him. To defend his previous comments, Buterin wrote a series of tweets saying:
“To be clear, I never said that there is “no room for growth” in the crypto ecosystem. I said there is no room for *1000x price increases*. A 1000x price increase from today means $200T in crypto, or ~an entire 70% of today’s global wealth being in crypto.”
“What I *actually* said is that, because large portions of the population have already heard of crypto, further growth of crypto in any sense must come from *depth* (ie. actual usage), and not bringing in more attention.”
Although Buterin is criticized over his understanding of economics, he certainly sounds quite legit in his views. With his comment that 70% of the world’s wealth will not suddenly convert into cryptocurrency, Buterin took a good jibe of TRON CEO Justin Sun. He also talked that how media twists his words for their own comfort.
Me: obviously, let's be realistic, the entire world wealth is not going to turn into cryptocurrencies…
Media: VITALIK IS A PESSIMIST!!!!!1!!1!
Guys, if you spin things this way you're *incentivizing* people to act more like @justinsuntron
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 12, 2018
Buterin was clearly targetting Sun’s continuous hype around the crypto market that looks somewhat far-fetched beyond reasonable expectations, even if it might be comforting to crypto investors and enthusiasts. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also supported Buterin on his response.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1039708663575801856
Justin Sun was quick to respond to Buterin’s tweet poking him saying that he believes that the entire world wealth will turn into cryptocurrencies. In his response tweet, Sun stated that the cryptocurrency market will touch $10 trillion market cap even before other business giants like Apple and Amazon.
I do believe the entire world wealth will turn into cryptocurrencies like blackhole and grow much bigger in the future. Cryptocurrency will hit 10 trillion USD market cap before @Apple and @amazon do. We will see. Time will tell. #TRON #TRX $TRX
— H.E. Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) September 12, 2018
Buterin previous comment of 1000x growth literally means $200T cryptocurrency market cap, and it certainly seems to a far-fetched destination from now on.
Ethereum And The Road Ahead
Ethereum is currently going through a pretty rough phase as the network developers face a tough challenge for future expansion and scalability.
In the past few weeks, there has been a heavy sell-off in the altcoin space as major ICO-token projects based on the Ethereum network has failed to meet their destination. This has caused ETH price to roll on a downward spiral with the ETH price hitting 2018 bottom around $170, just two days back.
At the price time, ETH price shows a good recovery of nearly 15% in the last 24 hours. ETH has pulled back above $200 and is currently trading at $217, according to the data on CoinMarketCap.