Ethereum is on sale y’all

Ethereum has recently launched their Frontier release, which is mainly aimed at developers. https://www.ethereum.org/.

After the release, the price has tanked from $3+ to $0.66.

What gives?

The release was a ‘flop’. The expectations were too high, and most people weren’t able to sell their funding pre-sale coins. Someone has made a Hitler Parody Video explaining the situation.

Furthermore, Ether is a running joke of the week on /r/buttcoin.

People are frustrated with the project. Most of the people don’t understand the technology behind it, or the state of development.

They just expect the ‘moon’. And the ‘moon’ never happened. Not yet.

There was some hype leading to the release, reflected in increased volume and rising price. A dump ensued.

Ethereum is a very ambitious project, and its not surprising that it requires substantial resources and time. Speaking of which, the following ‘leak’ might have added some fuel to the fire.

Without knowing the specifics of the financial situation, its hard to gauge on weather or not this holds merit, or if it is some good old FUD.

I am buying

I love things that are hated, yet show immense potential. Ether is the type of thing that could yield 10,000% gains in a few years timeframe. Think of early days of Bitcoin, when people said BTC was a monopoly money and you could have picked it up for 30c a piece. BTC is trading at $260 as of today.

Generally, its a bad idea to be catching a falling knife, which Ether certainly is. So I am buying in super small amounts. $100 at a time. So far, I’ve invested $300, at the entry prices of 30c, 68c and 86c respectively.

My next buying target is 30c, which in my opinion will act as support.

While Ether seems to be a really good investment opportunity, keep in mind this is also a super-speculative, high risk, low liquidity investment. My really big purchases will have to wait for now.

Here are the things I want to see before making larger investments:

Getting Innovative Startups on board

Ethereum is a platform, that allows anyone to build a distributed application of some sort. As far as innovation goes, the sky is the limit. What will make Ethereum platform cool and give it value, are the companies that build the ecosystem on top of it. These are the value creators and agents of change.

Getting to the point of stability

The Ether platform is still in its infancy, and there is not much you can do with it — yet. Its mostly a playground, where you can experiment with different ideas and hopefully build the next big thing.

Getting traction

Ether community is tiny. It is really early days for the project, and while I believe the technical team is strong, I am concerned about Foundation’s marketing abilities. For the project to thrive, it will need some serious growth, and ‘build it and they will come’ does not apply here.