The Year of Ethereum Experiments, Most Important Deployments of 2018

Ethereum (ETH) developments happened at each level of the ETH ‘stack’ that includes the core protocol and the users who launch it known as ‘Layer 1.’ This development includes the supporting developer tools and facility, which enable engineering on ETH’s potential. It also includes ‘off chain’ technologies, which enables developers to create fast and performant applications. It further includes the goods and commercial enterprises built on ETH, according to a hackernoon report.

These were the most significant developments in 2018:   

1. Massive numbers of people began using ETH, for very many things – although we are still very far from bulk adoption.   

From 2015 to 2017, there are mixed reactions on whether there would be a time when ETH would get beany demand. Currently, the answer is known: from late 2017, the ETH DLT has proceeded to be used close maximum capacity:   

   

The above graph indicates the utilization of the ETH blockchain tech at various points in time. Particularly, it is a measure of entire gas utilized divided by the gas limit. After the line reaches 1, that means that ETH DLT is being used at around 100% capacity.   

2. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) & Stablecoins – new types of applications which saw several product rollouts and some breakout successes.   

In 2019, several projects rolled out which were denotatively financial – uses or protocols which provide customers with new tools with which to handle and use ETH-based fund or assets. As a team, these later turned to be called ‘Decentralized Finance’ or ‘DeFi.’   

For the past year, the share of Ethereum ‘put away’ (such as used as collateral) in the smart contracts of various DeFi uses has increased:   

   

3. The year of #BUIDL – it turned out radically smooth to create applications on ETH. The ETH’s development & security equipping largely ameliorated, ETH became better at sharing best patterns, and hackathons turned to be a tendency.   

Developer tools improved, new security tools were officially issued, important frameworks were issued, and hackathons were a fixture in the society.   

Last year, the vision of common developers able to create something important on ETH turned out to be a reality, and the tooling required to use smart contracts in production massively ameliorated.   

4. Layer 2 scaling – several ‘layer 2’ applications rolled out, and vital progress towards setting the scaling solutions more friendly for developers to use was effectively made.   

The whole idea behind layer 2 scalability – to effectively unload computation from ETH onto ‘off-chain’ structures, while still keeping a distributed ledger technology’s (DLT) characteristic security warrants.   

These off-chain structures can effectively process transactions quicker and efficiently than ETH main-chain, resulting in highly scalable payments or (and) smart contracts.   

5. Zero knowledge technology – 2019 felt like each technical debate in ETH was:   

“Well, we can do it this way right now, but of course once we have good zkSTARKs, it will be like this…”   

In 2018, the ETH developer group started to take account that new zero-knowledge tech will cause a major impact on DLT.   

Several crypto maniacs heard of zero-knowledge technology (ZKT), popularly applied in the privacy digital currency Zcash. But ZKT won’t only be applied for privacy - it has useful implications for several scalability proficiencies.   

6. ETH 2.0 / Serenity – the roadmap coagulated, and it shifted from a research project to an engineering establishment.   

The history of Serenity has featured fictitious starts and impasses. But last year, the long-term ETH roadmap started to strengthen. 

In the month of January last year, the FFG testnet rolled out, although it faced challenges of networking which made it very hard to use. Nevertheless, after a few months, the research & study direction shifted from FFG to a plan that would more likely see Casper & Sharding launched together. In the second quarter, agreement in the opinion started to form around the present plan.