Cryptocurrencies have swept the financial markets this year, attracting some of the world’s most powerful institutional investors.
This week, bitcoin and ethereum hit new all-time highs, bringing the total crypto market cap to nearly $3 trillion.
Despite the profit-taking pressure from investors, Ethereum and Solana continued to trade near all-time highs, indicating the networks’ overall bullish sentiment.
Ethereum has closed the gap this past year with Bitcoin in market capitalization which is now approximately double Ethereum’s at $1.2 trillion.
Kenneth Griffin, the CEO of the American hedge fund Citadel, recently revealed his thoughts on why he believes Ethereum will eventually overtake Bitcoin as the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency.
“The early generation cryptocurrencies, bitcoin for example, are incredibly expensive to manage payments on. Bitcoin is a huge contributor to global warming, bigger than any form of payments we use around the world in aggregate,” Griffin told The New York Times’, speaking at the 2021 DealBook Summit.
Griffin, who established and controls the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, which oversees roughly $40 billion in assets, pointed to card companies’ willingness to cover fraud and theft costs as one of “a number of issues that haven’t been addressed by crypto as to how payments will be made more efficient.”
“I think we’re going to see ‘the ethereums’ replace bitcoin conceptually,” Griffin said, referring to a handful of ethereum rivals like as Binance’s BNB, Solana, and Cardano, whose prices have soared at a breakneck pace over the last year. “
Griffin considers payment disruption to be “the most appealing explanation” for determining the value of cryptocurrencies.
These newer cryptocurrencies, according to Griffin, will eventually be succeeded by the next generation, which will “benefit from higher transaction speeds, cheaper transaction costs, and perhaps people will start thinking about how to better deal with security and fraud prevention.”
The popularity of blockchain-based decentralised financing (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), both of which are mostly built on Ethereum’s blockchain network, has boosted the price of Ethereum in recent months.
Many others in the business currently share Griffin’s preference for Ethereum. Analysts at JP Morgan recently stated that while Bitcoin has likely reached its peak values for this cycle, Ethereum was expected to reach even greater highs due to its diverse use cases and planned switch to a Proof of Stake mechanism, which will dramatically cut its energy usage.
Solana’s consensus mechanism is Proof of History, which is based on Proof of Stake and uses the Tower BFT algorithm for consensus, which acts as a supplementary tool to validate transactions. Cardano, which recently rolled out it’s smart contract functionality is a Proof of Stake blockchain.