OmiseGo Founder Outlines Ethereum’s Future

Jun Hasegawa, the founder, and CEO at OmiseGo, a billion dollar blockchain network launched on top of the Ethereum protocol, has summarized Ethereum’s future and the trend of its progress in the next two years.

For both Ethereum and projects launched on top of the public blockchain protocol, 2017 was a year of prediction. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) and token sales raised billions of dollars per quarter, surpassing the number of money firms in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space made from recognized investors and venture capital firms.

The high extent of speculation in the cryptocurrency market was quite evident in the increasing price of bitcoin, ether and other major cryptocurrencies which spiked immensely since early 2017.

Following the major recovery made by cryptocurrencies in 2017, the third-largest recovery made way in the cryptocurrency market, resulting to major losses in bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, ripple and other cryptocurrencies of about 70 to 90 percent in their value.

According to Hasegawa, the recovery which is still evident has enabled the market and developers in the sector to develop products and determine solutions to support the next recovery.

Back in November 2017, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin noted that the $500 billion market cap of cryptocurrencies cannot be accepted without showing a significant effect on the traditional finance sector and the full capability of blockchain technology.

Buterin noted:

“So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we earned it? How many unbanked people have we banked? How much value is stored in smart contracts that actually do anything interesting? The answer to all of these questions is definitely not zero, and in some cases, it’s quite significant. But not enough to say it’s $0.5T levels of significance. Not enough.”

Ever since the cryptocurrency community has gone through significant development in scaling blockchain technology and boosting the applicability of cryptocurrencies. Hasegawa noted that 2018 has been a year of ecosystem development, with the progress made in the development of Sharding, Casper, Plasma, and interchain protocols which are important technologies that need to have hundreds of thousands of transactions to a million transactions per second on a public blockchain network.

Hasegawa went on to stress that in the coming two years, Ethereum will see real business adoption, increase large-scale decentralized applications (dApp), massive scaling, and adoption by the government, all based on the development of scaling technologies in 2018. He stated:

“2017: Speculation (ICOs)
2018: PoC / Ecosystem build / Scaling solutions ( L2 #Plasma #OmiseGO/ L1 #Sharding #Casper ) / Interchain protocols
2019 : Real business adoption / UIUX focus tools / More Dapps
2019 to 2020: Ethereum massively scales and used by Gov. We will see a huge difference between real adoptable protocol and toxic speculation project.”