Earlier today, an interesting observation was shared on the Ethereum community on Reddit, which pointed out that over 50 Million Ethereum unique addresses now exist. This is quite an achievement for the platform which started off in mid-2015.
An ‘address’ on the Ethereum blockchain, simply speaking, is the string of characters by which your Ethereum wallet is recognized as. This means that over 50 Million Ethereum wallets exist now. Every day, several new unique addresses are generated - the lowest number of Ethereum unique addresses were generated on the 6th of August, 2015 (a time when the platform very new in the crypto markets) - while the most number of Ethereum unique addresses (352,888) were generated on the 3rd of January, 2018: around the time Ethereum hit an all-time high price.
Ethereum’s growth has largely been attributed to the fact that its platform has a much larger degree of practical applications than compared to several other platforms. Further, the fact that it is one of the chosen platforms for ICOs and also for deploying decentralized applications (dApps) also helps the cause. For a majority of its run in the cryptocurrency markets, Ethereum has been the second-ranked cryptocurrency, right next to Bitcoin.
Over the past year, there were expectations that Ethereum may even surpass Bitcoins in market cap at some point in time, in an event called ‘Flippening’. However, given the current conditions of markets - that appears to be a far-fetched dream. Ethereum no longer holds the second spot in the markets as well, as the currency has dipped to no. 3 in the rankings - as Ripple’s (XRP) market cap has taken over that of Ethereum (ETH).
Ethereum, which has faced a sharp decline over the year, has come down from it’s all-time high price of over $1,400 to $85 as of this writing. The price of the currency has taken a major beating and continues to be in the red as the cryptocurrency markets are going through a strong bearish momentum. The currency’s market cap has also been affected. Earlier this year, when Ethereum stood at the highest point, the currency had a market capitalization of $133 Billion. As of this writing, it has come down to $8.8 Billion.
While 50 Million unique addresses is an impressive feat for the currency, members of the Ethereum community are trying to be more realistic about things. Some members of the community on Reddit have pointed out that some exchanges create temporary one-time addresses for incoming as well as outgoing transactions. This might add to a number of fake doubles or even triples - and hence, this metric may not be an indicator of the reality. However, this stands true for all currencies - and while the numbers may not be portraying the real picture, the trend is indeed spot on.
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