Ethereum has developed into a key pillar of the crypto ecosystem cementing itself as the second largest digital asset by market capitalization after Bitcoin. The smart-contract platform has given rise to a burgeoning landscape of tokens and decentralized applications (Dapps) onboarding a large volume of users into the digital-asset space. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) allows developers to deploy code in the form of smart-contracts that are verified and executed on the blockchain. Over the past few years, Ethereum has experienced periods of high user activity notably seen during the CryptoKitties launch in 2017 and the “DeFi summer” of 2020 – the period when several Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications facilitated by the EVM on Ethereum gained significant traction. These periods also saw a spike in transaction fees and processing times, highlighting the potential shortcomings with the scalability of the Ethereum Network. Some of the issues have been addressed through the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-1559) – an upgrade that helped stabilize transaction fees for users.

Unlocking the door to financial access for all

As we sit in a bear market - there’s increasing amounts of noise echoing from every direction - particularly on Twitter where sentiment has been chaotic to say the least. It’s become difficult to focus on fundamentals and easy to get carried away by the panic. Over the last few months we’ve encountered a turning point in the macro-economic environment with decade-high inflation paired with the start of quantitative tightening (QT) which has led to risk-assets (such as technology stocks & crypto) to be out of favor. Mix that in with the UST de-peg/LUNA collapse along with cascading liquidations for the likes of Celsius & 3AC.

It’s probably safe to assume that at this point, you have heard of various crypto-assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFT’s and more recently the extension of our physical lives into the virtual world —the Metaverse. However, before we start to float into these intangible worlds let’s bring our two feet back on the ground and perhaps below the surface. Uncovering the underlying technology behind these assets in a market developing at breakneck speeds — would do us far more justice in providing a foundational understanding of how we’ve arrived at this point (+ $2T in Market Cap) and the direction we’re headed in.