Ethereum (available on Coinbase) just hit a record low under the $400 mark, for the first time since late November 2017.

Source: CoinMarketCap

At press time, the ETHer-U.S. dollar (ETH/USD) exchange rate has now dropped to a low of $399.29 and is down -11.07%, in 24 hours. ETH’s price is down -52% for the month and is also down -45%, in 90 days.

Source: CoinMarketCap

ETHereuem has been plagued with the issue of scalability for quite some time now, with many new and emerging projects nipping at its heels. Devcon3, held in Cancun Mexico, took place the first three days of November and its main agenda was this very issue. Ethereum (available on Coinbase) saw quite a spike in its price when CryptoKitties emerged on the market in early December, but it clearly showcased the network’s limitations as the game came to a complete halt with over 20,000 pending transactions on the Ethereum (available on Coinbase) blockchain. Still, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum (available on Coinbase)’s leader, and co-founder, and his team of developers are steadily working on a fix.

Sharding is the process of splitting the blockchain to benefit from the computing power of more than one server. This is just one of the project’s that developers are working on to potentially improve Ethereum (available on Coinbase) scalability. Vlad Zamfir, a researcher at the Ethereum (available on Coinbase) Foundation, told the press:

“I like to spend my time working on blockchain sharding, which I regard as the only true blockchain scaling solution, and which I think will improve the scalability of the blockchain without sacrificing the security of the blockchain and the trust model.”

Plasma was invented by Buterin and Bitcoin (available on Coinbase)’s Lightning Network co-author Joseph Poon and it scales the network by removing unnecessary data from transactions and optimizing the smart contracts. The pair describes plasma saying:

“Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced the execution of ‘smart contracts’ which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide.”

Still, progress is being made on both solutions but from its price drop, obviously not fast enough. Have Ethereum (available on Coinbase) loyalists lost faith in the long-time crypto giant? Ethereum (available on Coinbase) remains largely in the lead of the 2nd largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Hopefully, the Ethereum (available on Coinbase) developers can work togETHer to come up with a solution before any of the other dApps centered blockchains that have scalability solved take over!

Featured Image: Verdict

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