“Ether’s price rally is a testament to the growing popularity of ethereum as a platform for decentralized applications. Over the last year and a half, we’ve seen that the majority of tokens issued during ICOs and traded on exchanges, have been coded to run on the ethereum network,” Thomas Glucksmann, head of APAC business development for cryptocurrency exchange Gatecoin, told CNBC by email.
Some of the developers behind ethereum have also been speaking publicly about the cryptocurrency. Steven Nerayoff, one of its co-creators said the increasing number of projects built on the Ethereum blockchain could trigger a so-called “flippening” in 2018, leading the digital coin to overtake bitcoin. Flippening refers to investors putting money into alternative cryptocurrencies.
Nerayoff told CNBC on Monday that the price of ethereum could “easily” double or triple by the end of the year.
But many have also sounded the alarm about the cyrptocurrency market. Another Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson told CNBC on Tuesday that the cryptocurrency market will see a “crash” and then consolidation. Noted Wall Street bear Davis Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former director of the Office of Management, also told CNBC that the cryptocurrency boom will end disastrously.
“It’s basically a class of really stupid speculators who have convinced themselves that trees grow to the sky,” he said in an interview earlier this month.
