The founder of Mythos Capital, Ryan Sean Adams, pointed out on Twitter that “Everything on Ethereum hit ATH this year except price”.
The cryptocurrency space grew tremendously in 2020. Perceptions changed dramatically on how blockchain, digital assets, and cryptocurrencies. Outside of Bitcoin, one of the biggest catalysts in the blockchain space is the colossal growth in decentralized finance (DeFi). In 2020, DeFi grew from less than $1 billion total value locked (TVL) to over $14 billion. With the majority of DeFi applications being built on the Ethereum network, this was a huge step to validate the usability of the platform for large scale, decentralized, financial applications.
Mythos Capital founder Ryan Sean Adams pointed out on Twitter that “Everything on Ethereum hit ATH this year except price”. Adams goes on to detail exactly what all time highs (ATH) he was talking about. These include Ethereum block utilization, hashrate, ETH open interest, DeFi users, Total locked value, BTC on Ethereum (known as wrapped Bitcoin, or WBTC), ETH in Grayscale, stablecoins on Ethereum, and staked ETH. Notably, Adams includes a green check next to each milestone, and a large red X next to the last point, “ETH price”.
A huge year For Ethereum
Along with the massive growth of the DeFi sector, Ethereum changed fundamentally as it transitioned from ETH 1 to the ETH 2.0 Beacon Chain. Launched in early December, Ethereum 2.0 changes the network validation method from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
The upgrade will allow users to stake their ETH in order to validate the network. This is in contrast to dedicating large amounts of electricity and computing power to solve algorithms. Moreover, it will benefit Ethereum users by increasing transaction speed while also decreasing transaction costs. The ETH 2.0 staking contract has already received millions of Ether from users wanting to validate the network. This resulted in over 1.5 percent of the entire Ethereum supply being staked on ETH 2.0.
There were many other landmark breakthroughs for Ethereum in 2020. Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust reached close to $2 billion in assets under management. Likewise, DeFi app production rose tremendously.
But Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, remains far away from its all time high price. Bitcoin saw mainstream institutional investment from a variety of firms in different industry sectors. Some firms invested over $1 billion in Bitcoin as an individual entity. Both users and institutions are looking to Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation amid global financial uncertainty. Bitcoin has been able to climb to new heights because of it. Ethereum has not breached its all time high price this year. However, surpassing every other possible milestone available is a strong sign of a healthy and growing network.
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