The co-founder of ethereum has made the argument that the cryptocurrency market hasn’t burst its bubble following a slump in market prices last week.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of ethereum, explained that it would be ‘shortsighted’ to say that the market had popped.

“It may be hard to tell because we’re so focused on ethereum, we’re so focused on building decentralised applications on the ethereum platform and we’re so much less focussed on cryptocurrencies like bitcoin,” he said. “But I would argue that we’ve seen a correction in our space, calling it a bubble to have been popped is a little bit shortsighted.”

He added that there was “foundational, fundamental work being built” and that it was still early days for the ecosystem.

His comments come at a time when the cryptocurrency market has experienced a downturn in price. Amid heightened pressure from authorities to regulate the market as well as a major selloff in coins, market prices have fallen. Over the weekend, bitcoin was trading at $7,400 while the price of ethereum had dropped to $465. At the time of publishing, ether’s value has improved slightly, at $534, according to CoinMarketCap.

Notably, though, it’s still a significant distance from the above $1,000 mark it has been experiencing of late. Bitcoin is currently trading at $8,270, which has seen a surge in price after G20 nations announced they would not be cracking down on cryptocurrencies.

Regardless of the drop in market values, Lubin appears happy with the direction that the industry is taking, particularly in relation to regulations.

“We are extremely happy about how things are going with regulators. There are many jurisdictions that are excited about the tokenised security of the utility tokens that wouldn’t be considered securities,” he said. “That’s actually true in this country as well, in the United States. There are many great applications being built worldwide on ethereum and with other blockchain technologies.”

He added that due to the number of fraudulent projects in the sector it’s ‘perfectly reasonable’ for a pause to occur, and that it was important for projects to do ‘their legal homework and issue tokens properly.’

Despite Lubin’s optimism it remains to be seen when and how market prices will recover. With the market still highly sensitive to changing environments, Ethereum prices could continue to fall along with other major cryptocurrencies if the market fails to secure a strong short-term rally.