The altcoin season has approached sooner than expected with multiple coins shooting up the price charts. Ethereum, the largest altcoin in the world, has had a tremendous year with a growth rate of 854 percent. Although the climb was punctuated with bear dips, major financial institutions were putting their faith in Ethereum to overtake Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs recently praised the Vitalik Buterin co-founded cryptocurrency and its widespread use cases.
Being one of the largest banks in the United States, Goldman Sachs’s comments play a big role in paving the way for mainstream cryptocurrency adoption. In a note to clients on Tuesday, the bank stated that Ethereum had “real use potential” which was the first step to becoming the “dominant store of value”. A lot of decentralized applications [dapps] built on Ethereum have taken off, prompting other organizations to jump on the bandwagon.
The letter from Goldman Sachs read:
“[Ether] currently looks like the cryptocurrency with the highest real use potential as Ethereum, the platform on which it is the native digital currency, is the most popular development platform for smart contract applications.”
At press time, Ethereum was surging at $2378 with a total market cap of $276.8 billion. A 111.3 percent price increase over the past week allowed the cryptocurrency’s daily trading volume to clock $23.9 billion. Only Binance Coin’s 13 percent weekly gain was ahead of Ethereum in the top 10 cryptocurrency club. Goldman’s comments on Ethereum come a few weeks after analysts from the bank had called the cryptocurrency that may not be as “inevitable” as people thought it was.
According to some financial analysts, the competition among cryptocurrencies was a major risk factor when mixed with user holdings. They added that once digital assets come out of their nascent stage, they can try to qualify to become a safe haven asset. Insider sources within the cryptocurrency world, however, only had glowing reviews for the world’s largest altcoin.
Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky recently said that Ethereum had already surpassed Bitcoin in dollar holdings at the company’s repository. In his words:
“The flippening already happened. The broader market will soon follow the Ethereum overtake in the next year or two.”