Ethereum’s performance in 2020 cannot be taken lightly as the second-largest digital asset has registered a growth of 125 percent over the first 44 days of the year. Its valuation increased from $128 on 1^st January to a yearly-high of $287 on the 14^th of February. Over the past three weeks, along with the collective industry, ETH witnessed a price slump but the token has been able to maintain its position above $200.

“Ethereum is pushing our Industry Forward”-Weiss Crypto Ratings

According to Weiss Crypto Ratings, a popular crypto rating entity, Ethereum is currently carrying the torch forward in the industry and suggested that the network is at a perfectly placed in the ecosystem from a perspective of trading or building decentralized applications.

Weiss’s reactions came at the back of Anthony Pompliano’s recent blog post about Ethereum where the popular Bitcoin proponent described Ethereum’s ideology as a currency to be fundamentally inaccurate. Anthony Pompliano went on to draw a comparison between Ethereum and fiat-money which attracted significant criticism from the community and Weiss Crypto Ratings was at the front of the pack.

The rating agency hinted a jab at Anthony Pompliano without taking his name directly and stated,

“We’ve seen people call #ETH “fiat money” while praising governments for their efforts to introduce their own “digital currencies” as it relates to crypto.”

It is important to note that Ethereum’s Decentralized Application-DeFi has been rising steadily over the last 6 months and has recently raised more than $1 billion worth of assets under its DeFi protocols.

Pompliano acknowledged the above sentiment and stated that DeFi is an important part of the digital asset ecosystem and it would likely represent and hold a significant place on the global financial system with time.

Ethereum Social Engagement continues to grow

In spite of receiving heavy criticism over the week, According to LunarCRUSH, Ethereum continued to claim a higher social engagement over the past few days. The organization which analyses various factors of social engagement including likes, comments, retweets, etc, etc indicated that ETH’s social volume has improved over the past day.

According to statistics, social engagement in the past 24-hours has improved by 12.7 percent and the token was 76 percent bullish in the digital market industry at press time. The number of posts in terms of social volume also increased, registering a hike of 25.2 percent over the previous day.

ProgPoW yet to be integrated with Ethereum

The current rise in social engagement could be due to Friday’s ETH core developer’s call. Ethereum hardfork coordinator James Hancock revealed that ProgPoW will not be a part of the hardfork that would be scheduled forward. Core Developers believed that at the moment the community was majorly anti-ProgPoW, and a change cannot be pushed ahead if there is a lack of support for the implementation.

With the future yet to be decided, it was pointed out during the call that both the supporters and opponents of the ProgPoW protocol wanted to avoid a disrupting chain split.

But why ProgPoW over PoS?

Proof-of-Stake has its pros over Proof-of-Work in terms of energy efficiency; mainly low computational power and less electricity consumption. Although concerns of security have grown as the community has started addressing issues with the PoS.

Under PoS, Profit centric, capitalists in the ASIC farms would progressively centralize the network to gain ownership of Ether for a close-knitted small group of parties, conceivably undermining the decentralization of Ethereum 2.0.

Whereas in ProgPow, the algorithm has been architectured to put bars on the efficiency of ASICs mining; ETH not more than 20% of the efficiency of the GPU can be mined. Making it profitable for small miners to scale and large rigs to limit their authority.

What does this mean?

Small miners or individual miners need not worry. If anything at all the update helps them leverage their current resources to get better mining opportunities. When it comes to mining giants such as Bitmain, Genesis, Canaan and more, their chances of exploiting the network vulnerability have decreased significantly. Opening doors for better security and decentralization.

Devs recognize that ProgPoW hardfork would be “contentious” due to its unconventional approach. Speculators have even raised their concerns regarding exchanges being in the position to run two Ethereum versions to create a chain split and new hardfork of Ethereum in order to increase their fee profitability on the platform. Although Ethereum core devs believe that’s highly unlikely.

Additionally, along with the update the core devs released details, such as:

Prysm Testnet is now working with 41, 686 validators and more than 300,000 system slots.

Anticipated public release of the next version of the massive Lighthouse testnet will happen soon.

Concepts derived from the ideas of Ethereum’s ‘operating system’ by Vitalik Buterin.

“Execution environments” intended to pass balances across shards in sharding.

Beacon Chain will highly likely occur by mid-2020

ethereum 2.0 ProgPoW