If the past couple of years taught us anything at all, it’s that nearly all news is narrative. The narrative being promoted now in the crypto space is engineered to push Ether’s price lower so that certain groups can profit from a price decline.

Remember that most of tech-financial media is designed to pump the owner (and their friends’) “bags”. The same game that was played for years pumping VC-backed startups transfers really well to the crypto world. [Note: oops.]

The Criteria That Matters

Here’s all you need to consider about Ethereum — it is the leading decentralized computing platform in all important metrics:

Consumer ecosystem Developer ecosystem Project adoption

1. Consumer Ecosystem

Ethereum has by far the best consumer ecosystem. This includes:

Wallets

The wallets that support Ether and ERC20 tokens are numerous and of generally outstanding quality. Excellent UIs and features abound. Wallets also do not require a full sync of the Ethereum blockchain, making them fast and easy to use. Some of the best are available on the web and do not require any sort of user registration. This makes for a frictionless and overall enjoyable experience.

I personally have found other blockchain project wallets to be of lower quality — often times just rehashes of the old “get the job done with no frills” Bitcoin QT wallet.

I find it telling that when Binance chose to purchase a wallet startup, that wallet was an Ethereum wallet.

And Coinbase Wallet, previously called Toshi, is designed with Ethereum tokens, collectibles, and DApps in mind first, before any other blockchain support.

Value-Add Software and Websites

Browser extensions like Metamask extend the browser with Ethereum and web3 support, giving consumers an easy way to use DAPPs on the web. When combined with web wallets, you also get a safe and secure way to interact with the Ethereum blockchain without having to expose your private keys.

Ethereum also has great supplementary websites to help with tracking gas prices, dapps, etc. The blockchain explorer of choice is well designed and pleasant to use.

DAPPs

Ethereum has by far the highest number of DAPPs. Some of my personal favorites:

2. Developer Ecosystem

You can measure the developer ecosystem by looking at the number of developers using a technology, and the sophistication of tooling and code libraries to interact with that technology.

Nothing comes close to Ethereum.

Loom Network published a great article covering developer adoption here: Ethereum Will Be the Backbone of the New Internet. Read that and then laugh at FUD attempts.

3. Project Adoption

Beyond DAPPs, there is a vast ecosystem of projects built on top of Ethereum. A small sample of projects, categorized broadly, follows:

Protocols and foundational libraries

Protocols such as 0x, which other projects then build on top of

Projects like Zeppelin that build new standards and libraries, shortcutting time to market for projects that use them

Scaling projects

Projects that extend Ethereum with side chains or “layer 2” scaling solutions — such as Loom Network, Raiden, or OmiseGo’s Plasma

Exchanges and liquidity providers

Liquidity providers such as Bancor, Airswap, Kyber, or DDEX’s such as IDEX

Projects solving fundamental blockchain problems

Consensus-based resolution of external data — the “oracle problem” — being solved by projects like Chainlink

FOAM protocol, which solves for decentralized location resolution

Decentralized finance

dYdX, which will bring transferable and sliceable token derivatives

Melonport, bringing low-friction tokenized hedge funds

Dharma, for tokenized lending

Multiple stable coins, some algorithmically backed and some tethered

Projects are becoming interconnected, forming partnerships, and leveraging new standards. These projects, in concert, are building a new financial system.

This new financial system will be decentralized, transparent, auditable, and governed by consensus.

There is a new financial system being built, and it’s built on top of Ethereum.

A valid criticism of a platform is that no one is building on top of it. You can see from the above this is simply not true with Ethereum. The adoption is amazing.