Cryptocurrency price turmoil has gripped markets over the last few weeks, with ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, losing around 50% of its value.
The bitcoin price has also fallen sharply from its all-time high of almost $65,000 per bitcoin set in mid-April, with fickle Tesla TSLA billionaire Elon Musk and fears of a China bitcoin and crypto crackdown taking the wind out of bitcoin’s sails.
Now, Todd Morley, the co-founder and former executive of investment giant Guggenheim Partners who’s become a crypto and blockchain investor and entrepreneur, has said he thinks ethereum has “much higher utility” than bitcoin—and is “where the action is.”
“Ethereum, to me, has a much higher utility [than bitcoin] through smart contracts,” Morley told Bloomberg TV, warning that companies that don’t have a digital strategy risk “something” suddenly showing up “and your walkman looks like an abacus.”
“Technologies that began, as described as, bitcoin are moving very rapidly into other parts of the world. The app developers of ethereum are growing at 20x for the past six years straight, much, much faster than Moore’s Law, so that’s where the action is.”
Moore’s law, coined by the engineer Gordon Moore in 1965, posits computing speeds double every couple of years along with the number of transistors per silicon chip.
Over the last 12 months, the popularity of so-called decentralized finance—using cryptocurrency technology built on top of ethereum’s network to recreate traditional financial instruments such as loans and interest and designed to replace the role of banks with blockchain-based protocols—has soared, helping the ethereum price rocket.
Meanwhile, the run-away popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), largely issued on ethereum’s blockchain, to digitalize art and collectibles have added another ethereum use case.
The ethereum price rally over the last few months has far outpaced bitcoin’s, with ethereum adding almost 1,000% compared to bitcoin’s 300%, even with ethereum’s recent price crash. The ethereum market capitalization, the combined value of all ether tokens in circulation, has soared to almost $300 billion, just under half bitcoin’s near-$700 billion.
Earlier this month, a report from Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs gave ethereum a “high chance” of overtaking bitcoin as a “dominant” store of value—calling it the “Amazon of information.”
“Given the importance of real uses in determining the store of value, ether has a high chance of overtaking bitcoin as a dominant store of value,” analysts at Goldman Sachs wrote, according to leaked sections of the report shared on Twitter.
Elsewhere, some think long-awaited upgrades to ethereum, begun at the end of last year and designed to help ethereum scale and reduce its sky-high transaction costs, could help the ether price reach never-before-seen heights.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor made famous by the reality television series Shark Tank, has said he expects ethereum’s long-awaited 2.0 upgrade will spark the development of apps that “dwarf” bitcoin.
