Ethereum, the world’s second most cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, is gradually losing its foothold in the market. Its market capitalization has almost halved since the end of June, and it is trading at just a fraction of its all-time high. Are all the crypto-flippening enthusiasts going to be proven wrong as Ethereum dies a slow death?

Ethereum had hit $1432 on January 13, 2018, when Ethereum-based tokens were still reigning because of ICOs and the overall crypto market behaving in an aggressively bullish manner. At present, however, Ethereum is trading at $17o, which is less than 12% of its all-time high price. 

The same, however, is not true for Bitcoin – the king crypto. Bitcoin, too, took a plunge after the long, bullish season of 2017. Its 52-week low stands at $3191. However, bitcoin climbed out of the trough in Q2 2018 and began moving upwards. It has been trading around the $10k mark in Q3 2019, which is about 50% of its all-time high of $20,089.00 on December 17, 2017. Bitcoin has also been expanding its market dominance steadily, and it now enjoys a market share of almost 71%. At press time, it is trading at $10, 380, 3% lower than yesterday’s price, after having enjoyed a bull run that began on Sept 1. 

Ethereum, on the other hand, has been on the decline in terms of market capitalization as well. At the beginning of Q3 2019, its market capitalization stood at $31 Bn, but now, it has shrunk to $18 Bn. It owns about 7% of the market share. Given the state of affairs for Ethereum, a crypto-flippening in the favor of the crypto, where it takes over the market cap of Bitcoin, seems highly unlikely in the near future.

The Ethereum fall can be attributed to the decline of ICOs and Ethereum-based alts. In 2017 and early 2018, Ethereum price was pushing up because of the ICO fever in which thousands of projects created their own tokens on the Ethereum blockchain for raising funds for their projects. The ICO mania fizzled out and companies who has raised funds through them liquidated their crypto holdings. 

Now, scalability issues with the Ethereum blockchain are keeping serious companies from developing their projects on it now. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum himself admitted that –

“The Ethereum blockchain has been ‘almost full for years, I think it’s still good to develop apps, but anything substantial should be developed with scalability techniques in mind…”

However, this may not be the end of Ethereum. The network is due for a major update in 2020 – Serenity, that is expected to solve the scalability issues of the blockchain. In a recent podcast, Buterin revealed that the Serenity update will allow Ethereum to process tens of thousands of transactions in a second and that “Ethereum 2.0 will actually be the world computer.”

If the Ethereum upgrade will be able to renew the interest of investors in the cryptocurrency, only time will tell. But, the network continues to remain quite popular among developers. There are an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 developers building on Ethereum. 

What do you think about Ethereum’s future? Will it die a slow death or will it bounce back? Share your views with us in the comments below!