A Good Week For Ethereum

Ethereum has been having a rougher time recently, with most of the attention focused on Bitcoin, and not many people discussing the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. This is changing as several endorsement or favorable comments come out, and more developments in the protocol are announced and released.

Amazon, one of the most powerful companies in the world, has recently launched a blockchain tool through AWS called Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB). AMB will help users create and manage their blockchains, and they are giving a big nod to Ethereum as being one of the best blockchains to do this on. As they said:

“Ethereum is well suited for highly distributed blockchain networks where transparency of data for all members is important.”

The service was initially announced last year and is now available for production use in a small region of the United States. They describe their service as such:

“You can create your network in minutes. Once created, you can easily manage and maintain your blockchain network. You can manage certificates, invite new members, and scale out peer node capacity in order to process transactions more quickly.”

Although only available on Hyperledger Fabric from the Linux Foundation right now, Ethereum is a planned part of the roll out.

Big Developments for the Protocol

All of this comes around the same time as news that Ethereum is planning to finalize their Proof-of-Stake (PoS) code in the next month or so. With an estimated completion date of June 30th, “Ethereum 2.0” will represent the biggest upgrade to the network to date.

The PoS code is referred to as Casper, and will replace the much more efficient mining methods currently in place. Sharding is the second part that will be added in, which represents a major scalability improvement to the chain.

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has estimated that these upgrades will results in a 1,000x factor increase in scalability for the protocol. However, it should be noted that the rollout will start with PoS, with sharding to be added later on.

Other Pertinent News

Combine this with the recent news that Societe Generale, the world’s 19th largest bank, has issued a security token on the public Ethereum blockchain. The French bank is one of the first to trust public networks with this task, and the $112 million bond issue using Ethereum smart contracts is a momentous step for financial institutions.

It seems like big banks are finally realizing they can’t fully turn their backs on the opportunities presented by public blockchains. After spending so long in denial about the utility of this new technology, baby steps like issuing a bonds where they are both issuer and investor may seem insignificant, but could also be the sign of shifting sentiments within the industry.

Outside of the banking industry, there are others who are starting to see the light in terms of Ethereum. Elon Musk, recently having reaffirmed his support for the idea of Bitcoin and what its eventual goal is, has shown support in his own way. On April 29th, he tweeted a single word: Ethereum. This earned thousands of retweets and comments, and created a whole new discussion around the coin.

Although trading down against BTC this week, ETH is up against the USD and all the above news is cause to believe there may be a bullish run for it as well. BTC and ETH have the strongest fundamentals of all the coins, because of their strong following, massive market caps, and different use cases. For that reason, they don’t tend to move in as strong a correlation.