Schmidt is a growing blockchain enthusiast who spoke about Ethereum (ETH) during a talk given at a Village Global live event in September. During the discussion, he claimed that the potential of Ethereum is “of the charts”.

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Schmidt’s conversation with host and economist Tyler Cowen was not only about cryptocurrency, but also involved corporate governance reform, Google’s hiring practices and the future of technology. When asked whether he thought blockchain was overrated or underrated, Schmidt declared that while it may be overrated in a public sphere, it was underrated in terms of technical use.

Schmidt goes on to give a hopeful assessment of Ethereum’s potential to utilize blockchain technology:

“If Ethereum can manage to figure out a way to do global synchronization of that activity, that’s a pretty powerful platform. That’s a really new invention.”

Schmidt was introduced to the field of cryptocurrency in 2011 by the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. In a five-hour interview, Assange explained the technical aspects of blockchain and Bitcoin (BTC) to Schmidt. He encouraged Schmidt to invest in Bitcoin, advising him to “be an early adopter. Because your Bitcoins are going to be worth a lot of money one day.”

This conversation is what got Schmidt interested in the evolution of cryptocurrency. He believes that while many blockchain projects are showing great promise, Ethereum is the most intriguing, with the potential to revolutionize society.

Ethereum is not like Bitcoin. While they both operate on blockchain technology, Ethereum’s main purpose is focused on the ability to run the code of any decentralized application, such as the social media platform TaTaTu. Ether tokens are simply used as a fuel for this system.

The price of an Ether token is currently at $213 USD. Tom Lee, the head of Research at Fundstrat, has claimed that he could see Ethereum reaching a value of around $1,900 USD in 2019.