Why Do You Need to Know Ethereum Mining Profitability?

Mining is nothing but the process of solving blocks or complex mathematical problems by making use of computing powers from specialized mining devices. In mining, user transactions are verified and then added to a blockchain which works like a public ledger. Rewards are given to the miners who have successfully solved the problems and these are the crypto coins. While in the case of Bitcoin, rewards will be in the form of Bitcoins, in Ethereum mining, rewards are in the form of Ether coins. To know whether it is actually profitable to mine Ethereum, it is advisable to check the Ethereum mining profitability beforehand. This is possible when you use online mining profitability calculators.

ethereum-vs-bitcoin-mining

How is Ethereum mining different compared to Bitcoin mining?

When there was an unprecedented spike in prices of Bitcoin, more and more people started mining this cryptocurrency. But, when they had mined for some time, it was realized that the mining processes had become sluggish and mining hardware required high-end maintenance and lots of electricity. So, the miners were keen to explore alternatives and this is how Ethereum mining came to be.

One of the key differences between Ethereum mining and Bitcoin mining lies in the fact that Bitcoin mining can be done with specialized hardware but Ethereum mining is done using GPUs. The Ethereum network is ASIC resistant and users are therefore not able to use dedicated hardware like in the case of Bitcoins. just like those having higher investment powers can produce superior mining rigs for mining the Bitcoin, similarly those having high-end GPUs can easily install a far more powerful mining rig. It is also possible to mine Ether using traditional CPUs. But this is not too productive and this is why mining with GPUs became more popular.

Ethereum mining is popular as it does not need very high-end costly devices and hardware which can burn a hole in your pocket. In short, Ethereum mining may be practiced at home as well and the energy demands for this mining are found to be lower than that of Bitcoin. Since it is easier to mine Ether, profits are also higher. While you may be expected to make some initial investments, these are much lesser when compared to investments for Bitcoin mining.

To know Ethereum mining profitability, you will need to use online mining calculators. You can enter different inputs in these online tools like hash rates, power consumption costs, hardware expenses, cooling costs, the current Ethereum price, mining difficulty levels etc. For mining, you will need to get specialized Ethereum mining hardware and software, an Ethereum wallet and Ethereum mining pools.

Finding out about Ethereum Mining Profitability:

The Ethereum mining calculator refers to a simple calculating device which can help you understand whether mining Ethereum will generate profit for you or not. It will tell you how many others you can generate through mining using specific hardware. For getting accurate results, you will have to consider electricity costs in the area were the mining rig is installed and the configurations of your mining rig.

It is important to understand that cryptocurrency mining is never an easy decision because miners must take into account all kinds of risks in it before they start out. With mining calculators easily available these days, it is possible for miners to verify the profitability of any cryptocurrency to make plans in advance. While the calculator is undoubtedly an excellent resource for the new miners in the business, it is equally useful for those who are already mining Ethereum. Since cryptocurrencies are dynamic by nature and many factors are constantly changing, like difficulty levels and current market prices, it is necessary to monitor Ethereum mining profitability all the time.

A key factor which can change your fortunes is the Ethereum price. Ethereum is considered to be the second largest cryptocurrency in the world but is prone to market volatility. It seems to be slightly more stable as compared to the Bitcoin which witnesses sharp rises and falls in its price. So, for those who are just starting out in the cryptocurrency mining business, it is crucial to know about this price volatility. When the demands rise for Ether, prices go up and when demands are low, prices automatically fall. But, unlike Bitcoins, Ethereum is not limited in number. This is perhaps why this cryptocurrency is more stable than the Bitcoin.

Among the factors which influence mining profitability of Ether the more common ones are prices of Ether in the market. The higher these prices, the better the profits you can make and when the prices fall, the profits are also lower. Costs of mining hardware will also influence the profitability. Mining is an expensive task and it needs high-end machinery which can cost you a fortune. Besides, power costs must also be taken into account to determine profitability. In mining, a lot of electricity is consumed and this is why countries which can offer low-cost power supplies are attracting miners.

DocuSign Will Add Ethereum Blockchain Integration to Verify Signatures


docusign ethereum blockchain

San Francisco based DocuSign has announced the integration of the Ethereum blockchain into its electronic signature and transaction management service.

The company, which currently has over 400,000 paying customers, will now have an option for customers to have evidence of a DocuSigned agreement automatically recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. This option will be an alternative to the company’s native system for verifying signatures and is poised to be a natural fit for customers who want to have evidence of their agreements in a neutral environment.

Ron Hirson, chief product officer at DocuSign, stated in the release:

“For customers that opt-in, DocuSign will compute a one-way cryptographic hash fingerprint for every completed transaction, and write the value to the Ethereum blockchain — the most popular blockchain for smart contracts in our view.”

He went further to explain the hash will act as “tamper-proof evidence for the transaction” that “enables any completed document to be validated independently. And by using the Ethereum blockchain, that third party evidence for a transaction is accessible to anyone.”

The company has been researching on smart contract since it first collaborated with Visa, creating one of the first public prototypes. The prototype, which was developed in 2015, was a proof-of-concept that brought together secure contracts and payments made online via a connected car prototype developed by Visa for car-based commerce.

At the time, Hirson said:

“This proof-of-concept makes it easier and faster for customers to get out the door in their new car by bringing together smart contracts and payments so that customers can electronically sign all pertinent documents and seamlessly pay in one fully digital experience.”

The company has also joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, as it hopes to continue innovating in the space. DocuSign recently relaunched a new developer center.

In a tweet shared on Oct. 13, the company also unveiled other new product features including Intelligent Insights and mobile document scanning into its operations. According to the report, mobile document scanning, which was released to iOS devices last year, is now compatible with Android devices.

This allows you to scan any document and then edit, crop, and resize them before importing them into DocuSign for your signature. Intelligent Insights is another feature that uses AI-based search and agreement analytics to go beyond keywords in understanding agreement clauses in the way a human would, e.g., knowing that a clause about Internet cookies is a document centered on privacy, even when the keyword “privacy” is absent.

Featured Image from Shutterstock

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement

SpankChain Hacker Returns Stolen Ethereum, Earns $9,000 Reward


SpankChain ICO

The hacker who stole nearly $40,000 in ethereum from adult entertainment startup SpankChain has returned the stolen cryptocurrency, the company announced last night.

According to messages posted on the company’s official Twitter account, SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani reached an agreement with the anonymous hacker after speaking to them on the phone.

Following that conversation, the hacker provided SpankChain with the private key to an address holding the stolen funds and then further helped the company retrieve a few thousand dollars’ worth of funds that had been immobilized during the attack.

In return, SpankChain sent the hacker $5,000 as a bounty reward, purchased the formerly-frozen tokens back from them for $4,000, and returned the 5.5 ETH the hacker had used when launching the attack in the first place.

As CCN reported, the hack occurred last Saturday when the attacker successfully exploited a “reentrancy” bug in one of SpankChain’s smart contracts. The bug, similar to the one that led to the infamous downfall of The DAO, allowed the attacker to trick the SpankChain contract into allowing them to withdraw funds, even after the attacker’s payment channel balance had gone below zero.

The hacker originally made off with $38,000 in ethereum, and the attack immobilized a further $4,000 worth of SpankChain’s initial coin offering (ICO) token, BOOTY. Most of those funds belonged to the company, who had planned a $9,300 airdrop to compensate users for their losses.

Instead, the company paid out about $9,000 to the hacker, still far less than the $50,000 the company said that it would have cost to audit the smart contract prior to its deployment on the mainnet. However, the company has acknowledged in retrospect that the peripheral costs associated with foregoing that audit far exceeded the savings.

But while this specific incident was resolved remarkably amicably, computer scientist Emin Gün Sirer‏ has warned that many Ethereum smart contracts remain vulnerable to reentrancy attacks. Subsequent hacks may not have quite such a happy ending.

Featured Image from Shutterstock

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement

Ethereum: We Haven’t Seen the Last of the Bug That Killed the DAO


ethereum The DAO

More than two years after the collapse of The DAO thrust the Ethereum community into civil war, one of the bugs that caused that caused that black swan event continues to lurk in many smart contracts, waiting to be exploited by hackers.

That’s according to Emin Gün Sirer‏, a computer science professor at Cornell and the co-director of cryptocurrency research initiative IC3, who said that he has seen a variety of smart contracts that may be vulnerable to a “reentrancy” attack that allows a malicious user to drain ETH from a payment channel.

“BTW, I’ve seen other contracts like this one that implicitly trust the erc-20 tokens issued on top of their platform to not perform reentrant calls. I’m sure this isn’t the last episode of this bug,” he wrote on Twitter.

Sirer was commenting on the news that SpankChain, an adult entertainment startup whose platform runs partially on Ethereum smart contracts, had been hacked for nearly $40,000 worth of cryptocurrency over the weekend.

As CCN reported, the company said that the hacker used a reentrancy attack to siphon 1165.38 ETH out of the smart contract over a series of transactions. In short, the attacker used a malicious smart contract to trick the SpankChain contract into believing that the attacker could withdraw funds from the payment channel.

The firm explained:

“The attacker created a malicious contract masquerading as an ERC20 token, where the ‘transfer’ function called back into the payment channel contract multiple times, draining some ETH each time.”

ethereum

As both Spankchain and Sirer noted, the attack was similar to the one that crippled The DAO, a decentralized venture capital fund that long held the record for most funds raised by an initial coin offering (ICO).

Worth as much as $150 million at a time when the total market cap of ethereum was still far below $2 billion, The DAO held nearly 15 percent of the total ETH supply on June 17, 2016, when an attacker stole 3.6 million ETH — today worth nearly $815 million — by exploiting its vulnerable smart contract.

We all know what happened next: a series of futile attempts to recover the funds, the infamous chat room conversation, and the contentious hard fork that resulted in the creation of Ethereum Classic.

Now, more than two years later, Ethereum has largely put The DAO hack in its rearview mirror. The ethereum price, which plunged as low as $6 in the months following the hack, now stands at $230. Hundreds of blockchain startups have used Ethereum to raise billions of dollars through ICOs, and thousands of developers are building decentralized applications (dApps) that run on the platform.

However, though the consequences may not always be quite as serious as they were on that infamous morning in June 2016, the bug that permanently altered the cryptocurrency landscape appears determined to continue to rear its ugly head.

Images from Shutterstock

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement

Decentralized[?] Ethereum Exchange IDEX Waves Goodbye to New York Traders


IDEX, a self-described decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX) that allows traders to trustlessly exchange Ethereum tokens, has announced that it will no longer provide trading services to customers with IP addresses originating from New York.

Ethereum DEX to Block New York IP Addresses

Beginning tomorrow, Oct. 25 at 6 pm UTC, New York users will be barred from placing new orders on the platform, the exchange operator announced on Twitter.

According to the platform’s terms of service, which was last updated on Sept. 20, users in Washington state and North Korea are also prohibited from trading on the exchange.

“Any user that is found to be using the Service from one of the aforementioned jurisdictions will lose access to their account,” the service agreement reads, “their funds will be frozen until the direct withdrawal function activates and the user can interact with the IDEX contract directly to withdraw their assets.”

Presumably, traders in New York and other prohibited regions could still access the platform by using a VPN to mask their actual locations, though it’s unclear whether the service will blacklist Ethereum addresses previously associated with IP activity from prohibited areas.

New York, the creator of the controversial “BitLicense” framework, maintains one of the strictest regulatory regimes for cryptocurrency exchanges, which is why only a handful of cryptocurrency companies have received authorization to operate in the state and provide services to New York residents.

Such regional restrictions, along with the ever-increasing number of centralized cryptocurrency exchange hacks, have many within the industry optimistic about the current and future development of decentralized exchanges, which allow traders to swap between cryptocurrency tokens while retaining custody of their funds. Major centralized exchanges including Binance, OKEx, and Huobi have even announced plans to build their own DEX-like platforms to complement and perhaps eventually replace their centralized services.

How Can a Decentralized Exchange Block IP Addresses?

Ethereum DEX IDEX
IDEX allows users to trade more than 400 Ethereum-based tokens against ether (ETH), though most of these markets are thinly-traded. | Source: CoinMarketCap

However, needless to say, the fact that an operator of a self-described DEX retains enough control over the platform to block users from a particular jurisdiction raises questions about how decentralized that platform actually is.

IDEX is operated by the Panama-registered Aurora Labs S.A., which has developed a variety of blockchain applications, cryptocurrency tokens, and protocols. According to TokenData, the firm raised $5.3 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) concluded in January. CoinMarketCap ranks IDEX as the 114th-largest cryptocurrency exchange (DEX or centralized), with daily turnover of $2 million and 30-day volume of $39 million.

While Aurora describes IDEX as a decentralized exchange — hence the “DEX” in IDEX — it also relies on some centralized off-chain infrastructure, namely a trading engine that allows users to trade continuously without waiting for individual transactions to be mined on the underlying Ethereum blockchain. Meanwhile, the IDEX smart contract trustlessly stores funds and settles funds based on the off-chain trading data.

“By separating trade matching from execution, IDEX provides the speed and user experience of centralized exchanges combined with the security and auditability of the Ethereum Blockchain,” the firm explains.

That hybrid model certainly improves the user experience over some other decentralized trading platforms while maintaining the crucial feature of leaving funds under user control. At the same time, however, it requires IDEX to be the only entity authorized “to submit signed trades to Ethereum,” which could make the company more vulnerable to scrutiny from authorities in more highly-regulated jurisdictions like New York. Consequently, traders who desire a fully-decentralized experience may have to resign themselves to platforms that trade a friendlier user experience for reduced reliance on off-chain services.

CCN has reached out to IDEX for more information on the IP ban and will update this article upon receiving a reply.

Featured Image from Shutterstock

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement

This Month in Crypto: Gaming on the blockchain, London School of Economics, Sergey Brin, and more

A curated selection of meaningful moments in July that are bringing us all closer to realizing an open financial system for the world.

Fuel Games, world’s first blockchain based eSport, launches with presale
Gods Unchained, a multiplayer strategy game, will leverage blockchain technology to offer gamers trust-free ownership of the items they buy or earn in games. “As the games industry switches to asset-driven revenue models, players have a more urgent need than ever for guarantees about the value and tradability of those assets,” said James Ferguson, co-founder and CEO of Fuel Games, a Coinbase Ventures-backed startup.

London School of Economics launches online course
For over one hundred years, LSE’s motto has been to “understand the causes of things.” In service of its mission, the university is launching an online course next month, Cryptocurrency Investment and Disruption. Over six weeks, students will “explore how cryptocurrencies and blockchain will shape the future of money, society and industries.”

CFA exam adds crypto and blockchain topics
CFA Institute, which has helped train more than 150,000 financial professionals, is adding topics on cryptocurrencies and blockchain for the first time next year. Material for the 2019 exams will be released next month, giving candidates their first opportunity to start logging a recommended 300 hours of study time. According to a July 16 story in Bloomberg, the CFA added the topics, part of a new section called Fintech in Investment Management, after people in the industry demonstrated an increasing amount of interest.

Learn Plasma is a new resource for people curious to learn more about Plasma, an Ethereum scaling solution. Vitalik Buterin shares his latest post in a series on STARKs, a privacy-enhancing cryptographic building block. In June, the Ethereum Core Developers announced they would combine two scaling initiatives — Casper and Sharding — into one: unofficially named Shasper. V2.1 of the design is now available. Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille submitted a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) for a Schnorr-based signature format, which, if implemented, would help improve efficiency and privacy.

ICO volume in the first half of 2018 is already double that of 2017
PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Swiss Crypto Valley Association partnered on a report around the volume of initial coin offerings (ICOs). “In the first 5 months of 2018, a total of 537 ICO’s with a volume of USD 13.7 bn have been closed successfully — which is more than all pre-2018 ICOs combined,” the report states. “The US, Switzerland and Singapore remain key global ICO hubs, however, over the past months, the UK and HK gained significant ground.”

G20’s Financial Stability Board shares how it will monitor crypto assets
In this month’s G20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the global financial system, shared several metrics that it will use to keep an eye on the developing crypto markets.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin outs himself as a crypto miner
At July’s Blockchain Summit in Morocco, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin shared that his “side hustle” is mining ether (ETH) alongside his 10-year old son. “A year or two ago, my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC,” said Brin, according to a recap in Business Insider. “I told him, ‘Okay, if we get a gaming PC, we have to mine cryptocurrency. So we set up an Ethereum miner on there, and we’ve made a few pennies, a few dollars since. . .I see the future as taking these…research-y, out-there ideas and making them real.”

Why New Generation Stablecoins are Crucially Based on Ethereum


TrueUSD (TUSD), Circle Coin (USDC), Gemini Dollar (GUSD), and Paxos (PAX), new generation stablecoins competing against Tether (USDT), are all based on the Ethereum blockchain network.

Crucially, all of the three above mentioned stablecoins are fully audited, transparent, and regulated, which allow them to obtain stable banking services and guarantee the ability of consumers to redeem the tokens based on a 1:1 ration with the US dollar.

Ethereum-Based Tokens

Deploying a stablecoin on top of the Ethereum blockchain protocol instantaneously improves the compatibility of the asset with existing infrastructure. For instance, users of GUSD, PAX, and TUSD can utilize hardware wallets like Trezor and Ledger along with software wallets such as Metamask to send and receive stablecoins.

“Improved send and receive. Two Ethereum wallets can quickly send and receive any amount of USDC at any time of day. Large transfers for business purposes become as easy as small e-commerce payments. Consumers can use the Coinbase app to send USDC to someone, while remaining confident the value is stable,” the Coinbase team explained, which recently integrated USDC with Circle.

It also allows exchanges to easily integrate stablecoins without the necessity of creating a new infrastructure to support stablecoins.

The Coinbase team emphasized that the usage of the Ethereum blockchain network enables developers to program the dollar, which allows fintech companies to develop programs that can easily and securely facilitate stablecoin transactions.

“A programmable dollar. For developers and fintech companies, a digital dollar like USDC is easier to program with. For example, given the private keys for USDC, a program can easily send and receive them back and forth using the public Ethereum blockchain.”

Most importantly, with stablecoins launched on Ethereum, users can track the circulation of the tokens with block explorers like Etherscan. Because the tokens are stored in smart contracts, users can track the amount of US dollars stored in a particular stablecoin, increasing the overall transparency of the currency.

Subsequent to its launch, the Gemini team heavily emphasized the fact that GUSD is built on the Ethereum network with compliance with the ERC20 token contract standard, due to the various benefits the compatibility with Ethereum can provide.

“To date, there has been no trusted and regulated digital representation of the U.S. dollar that moves in an open, decentralized manner like cryptocurrencies. Enter the Gemini dollar — a stable value coin (often called a “stablecoin”) that is (i) issued by Gemini, a New York trust company, (ii) strictly pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, and (iii) built on the Ethereum network according to the ERC20 standard for tokens.”

Cryptocurrency is in a Growth Curve

The cryptocurrency market and industry are in a growth curve. In the years to come, as infrastructure surrounding the cryptocurrency market strengthens, opaque, inefficient, and unregulated platforms, assets, and projects will be replaced with more practical, transparent, and regulated alternatives.

The stablecoin market has seen the emergence of new competitors against Tether that are transparent, regulated, and compliant with the existing infrastructure in the market.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement

Ethereum Price Shorts Reach Record Levels


Ethereum

Beginning on Thursday, crypto markets experienced a massive sell-off which affected most coins and brought down total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies to $200 billion, down $25 billion in the space of a few hours in what was overall a bearish week for cryptocurrencies as a whole, but ethereum in particular.

Behaviour of investors indicates that the market expects ethereum to fall even further.

Record ETH Shorts and Possible Reasons

At the moment, of all the major cryptocurrencies, ethereum appears to be the worst hit by the selloff, after months of weak performance. At the moment, more than 300,000 short positions have opened for ethereum as investors continue to bet on its price falling even lower.

A possible reason for this is the existence of sizeable ICO selloffs. According to this school of thought, following a prolonged period of carnage in a persistent bear market that does not look set to end anytime soon, many ICOs have sold their ETH positions to make up for potential losses that may occur in the future and to fund their continued project development and operations.

It will be recalled that at the peak of the crypto market bull run, which coincided with a steep jump in popularity of ethereum-based ICOs, ETH traded at about $1,500. Since then, it has fallen more than 90 percent, causing many investors and ICO treasuries to offload their holdings in order to avoid more losses.

Another school of thought has it that the record number of short positions sparked by the general crypto market selloff is down to a decline in global equities. Thejas Naval, an analyst at Element Digital Asset Management disagrees with this notion, stating that recent price drops in the crypto market have no correlation to the stock market.

In his words:

“There’s a narrative that the crypto market was simply falling in lockstep with the equity markets, which are slowly entering into correction zones. We believe this move in cryptocurrencies had nothing to do with the stock market.”

According to Naval, there is however evidence that the price of bitcoin and global stock indexes have a little link between them. The recent mass selloff trend in the crypto market has also affected the market lodestar bitcoin, which fell as low as $6,200 following the drop it experienced on Thursday.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement

New Protocol Lets EOS dApps ‘Teleport’ Tokens from Ethereum


EOS ethereum

Arguably the most important contribution of Ethereum is the real-world implementation and accessibility of smart contracts.

From smart contracts follow decentralized applications or “dApps,” which enable common users to interact with financial and other purposes of the blockchain without necessarily needing to be cryptocurrency savvy. So many smart contracts and dApps have been launched on the Ethereum network that it has seen severe congestion at times, which has led to the development and implementation of third-party platforms which are still connected to the Ethereum network but enable more efficient operation through different methods of processing finalized transactions on Ethereum. Several have been launched over the past couple of years, including Raiden (developed by an Ethereum co-founder). However, other projects, like EOS, have abandoned Ethereum altogether in pursuit of alternative scaling technologies.

online gambling
To date, the most popular dApps have been associated with gambling and cryptocurrency trading.

Smart contracts and dApps already operating on the Ethereum network may recognize the value in moving to a more scalable option such as EOS, but until now there would have been a great deal of work involved in porting such applications to the EOS architecture.

shEOS, a firm which helps companies launch EOS tokens and provides important infrastructure for that network, has recently created a new protocol called EOS21 which enables the smooth transition of ERC-20 tokens (standard Ethereum tokens and smart contracts) to the EOS ecosystem. “We think developers should have that technical and creative freedom, so we designed a protocol to make it possible,” the firm says of the development. They also wrote:

“Recently, the importance of one specific development has become clear to us, and that is inter-blockchain communication and interoperability. […] How empowering would it be for developers to have freedom to move their tokens to any chain they wanted to? To any chain they felt best addresses the needs of their particular project. It’s widely known that each blockchain offers certain qualities that make it more appealing depending on the needs of the dApp developer.”

What This Means for Users

Everyday users of Ethereum dApps may not immediately see any change, but ultimately this project could lead to an exodus from Ethereum mainnet to the (in some ways) more attractive EOS environment. EOS is capable of settling transactions faster and handling more users. There are dedicated servers operated by numerous firms including shEOS. The benefits to common users may not be seen for a while, but for developers and firms looking to improve their Ethereum dApp products, the EOS21 protocol could certainly be a gamechanger.

Potential applications of the protocol are myriad, including “two-way pegging.” This would mean that EOS tokens could be paired with traditional Ethereum tokens for some applications, a powerful possible implementation. The firm even foresees ETH transactions being authenticated via EOS, or vice-versa. Furthermore, a pro-open-source firm to the core, shEOS openly encourages similar projects or even other blockchains like Ripple/Stellar to copy their idea and build on it.

Images from Shutterstock

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement

What 30 Million Ethereum Transactions Reveal about the State of DApp Development


ethereum wallet dapp cryptocurrency

New data from cryptocurrency prime dealer SFOX has painted a somewhat bleak picture of the current state of dApp development on the Ethereum network.

According to the data which was obtained from an analysis of more than 30 million Ethereum transactions, the top 10 smart contracts on the network are dominated by ICO and exchange activity, with a solitary spot for the popular CryptoKitties dApp.

The data shows that contrary to the promise of Ethereum as a simple and powerful engine for powering smart contracts that dApp developers can use for any purpose, the cost and scaling issues still present a significant challenge to the actualisation of that vision.

Ethereum’s Smart Contract Promise versus Reality

At the height of Ethereum’s bull run several months ago, ETH reached a high of $1,374, a figure that was driven largely by speculative pressure, but also by hopes sparked by the promise Ethereum offered as a smart contract and decentralised global computing platform. To investors, the core value of Ethereum was the utility presented by its smart contract capabilities, which not only created a new framework for executing trades and transactions, but also gave developers the opportunity to create decentralised applications that would essentially disrupt many existing centralised business models.

The new data from SFOX, however, paints an altogether different picture of how things have turned out in reality. Using a Jupyter Notebook to query Google’s public Ethereum dataset hosted on BigQuery, SFOX has revealed that of the top 10 Ethereum smart contract addresses by transaction volume, only one is held by a dApp.

Nine of the 10 addresses featured are dedicated to centralised exchange activity, decentralised exchange activity and ERC20 ICO token sales. The only dApp smart contract on the list is the popular CryptoKitties dApp which creates non-fungible tokens running on Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard. In other words, by far the vast majority of Ethereum smart contract activity is still dedicated to trading ether and Ethereum-based tokens. dApps have simply not taken off in the way that investors hoped they would, and this is for a number of reasons.

In August, CCN reported that Ethereum and EOS had only eight dApps with more than 300 active users between them. This factors cited for this lack of activity were principally gas costs on the Ethereum network and scalability problems. Ethereum, in particular, is notorious for experiencing high gas fees during times of network congestion that effectively cripple dApp operations.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.


Advertisement