LONDON — Ether, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, has been stealing the limelight from bitcoin lately.
That doesn’t come close to the returns on meme-inspired crypto dogecoin, which is up over 11,000% year-to-date.
For Buterin, bitcoin was too limited in functionality.
Put simply, bitcoin is a payments network that can be used to transfer value between two people anywhere in the world.
A big trend in Ethereum right now is decentralized finance, a term that refers to traditional financial products like loans and mortgages that are built using blockchain.
Ethereum is far from perfect, though.
More and more ether is getting stashed away for a “lockup” period by token holders seeking to become stakers and validate transactions on the new network.
The latest rally has reminded some investors of the 2017 crypto bubble, in which bitcoin ran up toward $20,000 before plummeting as low as $3,122 a year later.