Dan McArdle, Mesari Co-Founder and the previous director of curriculum at the Digital Currency Council (DCC), has recently noted that Ethereum’s fundamentals haven’t’ changed, despite the bearish trend the cryptocurrency recently endured.
Via a tweetstorm, McArdle pointed to prominent community members that have been “changing their investment thesis” over the past few weeks, mostly regarding Ethereum and its Ether token.
2/ Obviously we're seeing this mostly with ETH. But nothing fundamental has changed recently. The following always was, and remains, necessary to believe in order to put any stock in the ETH bull thesis:
— Dan McArdle (@robustus) August 15, 2018
The OnChainFX founder went on to state various points that should be behind an ETH bull thesis. Among these are its change from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), and whether it’ll be able to successfully implement it.
PoS will reward users for staking the cryptocurrency. Per McArdle, staking rewards will have to “be sufficiently low friction” so that ETH’s inflation isn’t a factor for investors who are staking it.
Its sharding scaling solution, which aims to split the network into several concurrent ones to allow it to scale more efficiently, will also need to be successful, McArdle noted. Both sharding and PoS will have to be secure. As Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin stated, a trust layer is necessary.
Moreover, McArdle added that for Ethereum to be successful, people will have to choose to hold Ether they want to use in decentralized applications (DApps) for their convenience, and that the ETH network will have to become “credibly immutable beyond any questions.”
The analyst further added the cryptocurrency’s network-effect lead will have to be strong enough for it to fend off potential competitors – often named “Ethereum killers” – to succeed. All of the above combined should see people hold the cryptocurrency, helping it become a store of value.
11/ All of this has always been necessary for the ETH bull thesis (and still is). Either you believed there was sufficient probability in all of the above being the case months ago or you didn't.
— Dan McArdle (@robustus) August 15, 2018
McArdle’s tweetstorm came after Ethereum’s price plunged to an over 52-week low of little over $250, from about $410 in the beginning of August. According to CryptoCompare data the cryptocurrency plummeted from nearly $1,300 late last year to about $290 at press time.
Despite ETH’s poor price performance, McArdle maintained “no new information has come to light on any of this that I can see,” implying those who are selling and/or shorting Ethereum because of its price are speculators or are exiting their positions out of fear.
As CryptoGlobe covered, BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes has recently slammed Ethereum in a “Crypto Trader Digest” newsletter, where he called the cryptocurrency a “shitcoin,” whose price was bound to plummet to $100. Per Hayes, ETH’s price mostly surged thanks to speculators and poor quality initial coin offerings (ICOs).
Hayes’ crypto derivatives exchange has notably recently added ETH/USD contracts that let users either long or short the cryptocurrency with up to 50x leverage. Some believe this will be the most liquid ETH pair on the market.
