Today’s steem power-down series is about ethereum and its native currency, ETH. This power down series is dragging on a bit (I’m almost done!!). I noticed recently there’s another fork of steem to power down - BLURT. Rest assured, I won’t be writing a BLURT power down series (may get a total of 25 HIVE at current exchange rate). All my BLURT will be powered down and converted to Hive.
Ethereum boss. Great t-shirt! Source
ETH has, for most of its life, been the number 2 cryptocurrency by market cap - one of the OG altcoins (excluding pretenders like Litecoin and Feathercoin). However, the ethereum ecosystem is so big I have never thought of it as an altcoin. From my perspective, there are two big daddy cryptos (BTC and ETH) and all the others are ‘alts’. The most developers in the crypto / blockchain space are building on ethereum. Most DeFi action happens on ethereum. Most of the exciting action in the art / NFT space happens on ethereum.
Ethereum is now at a crossroads - the popularity of DeFi has taken it to capacity, resulting in slow transaction times and high GAS costs. These are the two biggest problems. However, with ethereum 2 hopefully coming soon these problems will be solved at some point in the next year or two. Most people reading this will understand that crypto investing is highly speculative, that we should only invest what we can afford to lose, etc, etc. However, if ethereum 2 solves its biggest current problems and if staking rewards give folks market-beating returns (versus say S&P500??), then I see it as one of the best investments around and I believe that this will lead to it outperforming BTC in the long-term. For all these reasons I transferred some of the STEEM from my steem power-down to Binance exchange and traded it for ETH.
The other thing with ETH is that it obviously has a lot of utility. It’s a store of value but it’s also the main unit of exchange on the ethereum blockchain. There are lots of exciting technologies to ‘experiment with’ (aka speculate - YAM, for example - RIP) on ethereum and so I find it very difficult to HODL liquid ETH. Thus most of the STEEM I traded for ETH I ended up spending on buying Axie Infinity (one of my current obsessions) LAND. I also have some ETH locked up in a MakerDAO ‘Vault’, some in yield-farming liquidity pools (with ANT and AMPL) and have recently been buying small bags of fractionalised NFTs on Niftex.
Long ETH. The next (and final) instalment of my steem power-down series will - of course - be hive!! Thanks for reading.
Definitely ETH is a MUST HAVE in anyone’s portfolio