Ian McLeod, a tech analyst working for Thomas Crown Art, an art agency that uses the Ethereum blockchain to protect the industry it’s in, has recently argued ETH could take half of bitcoin’s market cap within five years.

Speaking to MarketWatch, McLeod argued the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has recently found a bottom after its price plummeted, and that its price will reflect the growth of the utility of its blockchain.

He was quoted as saying:

Not only do we think it will rebound considerably before the end of 2018, I believe that over the longer time it will significantly dent bitcoin’s dominance. In fact, I think we can expect bitcoin to lose 50 percent of its cryptocurrency market share to ethereum, its nearest rival, within five years.

Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, is currently trading at $6,300 and its market cap is of $110 billion, over five times that of ETH, which is currently of $21.3 billion. Taking half of bitcoin’s market share would mean ETH could become the number one cryptocurrency – an event market watchers dubbed “the flippening.”

Ethereum’s ether is, at press time, trading at $209.7 after falling nearly 1% in the last 24-hour period. In the last 30 days, the cryptocurrency plummeted from about $300 to a low of $170, before recovering, according to CryptoCompare data.

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Ethereum has notably been able to recover at a time in which the number of people betting against it keeps rising. McLeod, citing the utility of ETH for his firm, claimed the cryptocurrency offers much more than BTC, as it allowed Thomas Crown Art to “create a system to use artworks as a literal store of value.”

Per his words, it also solved authenticity and provenance issues, as all of the firm’s works are “logged on the Ethereum blockchain with ‘unique smART contract.” Unless BTC faces its scalability issues, he said, the next five years will see ETH surge.

As MarketWatch points out, ETH is no stranger to scalability issues itself. While its network can process more transactions per second than that of bitcoin, the difference can seem minimal to users dealing with high fees and slow processing times.

The Ethereum network is set to scale thanks to major updates, which include Sharding, Plasma, and its long-awaited transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. Defending the cryptocurrency and its network, McLeod added that ETH is “already light years ahead of bitcoin in everything but price.”

Notably rating agency Weiss Ratings tweeted out in agreement.

ETH-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are also set to scale. As CryptoGlobe covered Ethfinex has recently launched ‘ETHfinex Trustless’, a non-custodial exchange in which users won’t have to sign up to trade in. The exchange is reportedly sharing Bitfinex’s order books.