Digital asset management firm CoinShares recently released their overview of the crypto asset market for the second half of 2018. In the report, Ethereum’s 2018 is summarized as a disappointment in terms of progress with planned protocol upgrades.
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This portion of the report starts by pointing to a statement Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin provided to TechCrunch in January 2018.
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“I expect 2018, at least within the Ethereum space that I’m best able to speak about, will be the year of action. It will be the year where all of the ideas around scalability, Plasma, proof-of-stake, and privacy that we have painstakingly worked on and refined over the last four years are finally going to turn into real, live working code that you can play around in a highly mature form in some cases on testnets, and in some key cases even on the public mainnet. Everyone in the Ethereum space recognizes that the world is watching, and we are ready to deliver,” said Buterin.
“Neither H1 nor H2 2018 turned out to be anything of the sort,” says the report in relation to Buterin’s comments.
Constantinople Delays
In the CoinShares report, the first example of Ethereum’s disappointing 2018 is the Constantinople hard fork. While it was originally slated to launch in the first quarter of 2018, it was eventually delayed on three separate occasions. On top of that, the last postponement was made in the 11th hour due to the discovery of a bug.
The late cancellation of the hard fork caused a temporary chain split that was resolved in a matter of days. According to the CoinShares research team, this split probably caused significant monetary losses for the miners
