Around 23:30 UTC on Monday (June 1), the price of Etheruem (ETH), the second-most valuable cryptoasset (by market cap), broke through the $250 level — on crypto exchange Coinbase — for the first time since February 24, as you can see in the six-month ETH-USD price chart for Coinbase:

ETH-USD Six Month Chart on 2 June 2020.png

According to data by CryptoCompare, Ethereum’s move above the $250 level took place at 23:30 UTC (or 19:30 EDT) on June 1, i.e. approximately 40 minutes after President Trump finished delivering his “law and order” speech from the White House’s Rose Garden.

Yesterday, Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian programmer who is a co-creator of Ethereum, tweeted about how Ethereum’s “layer 2 scaling strategy” had “basically succeeded”:

Buterin made several noteworthy comments about the present and the future of Ethereum layer 2 (L2) scaling:

  • “First, the systems that are near-ready today are by and large limited to payments and DEX.”
  • “But even still, token transfers / DEX are a large part of ethereum activity.”
  • “The challenge is that users would need to have wallets where their coins are stored in a rollup (or plasma). This is an adoption challenge, not a technical challenge”
  • “The operator can’t steal; that’s the point of L2s instead of sidechains. If it’s correctly designed, the operator also can’t disappear and permanently freeze the funds. But the L2s should be designed so that if the L2 disappears, you can withdraw funds *as fast as possible*”
  • “So if the wallet detects that the operator is offline, it withdraws your coins and seamlessly switches to being an on-chain wallet. ZK rollups in particular can theoretically allow withdrawals even in the uncooperative-operator case within minutes; imo they should do this.”
  • “And the various optimistic systems (incl plasmas) can achieve fast in/out movement with a liquid secondary market for withdrawals-in-progress. We need to start setting up this infrastructure!”
  • “Also a suggestion: every L2 should do a drill where the team suddenly shuts down all centralized components that they are running. Verify that the ecosystem can seamlessly recover from such a situation.”

When asked to explain these comments in “digestible English”, Buterin replied:

The Twitter thread referred to in the initial tweet by Buterin was by Philippe Castonguay, who does Ethereum research/development at Toronto-based gaming startup Horizon Blockchain Games.

What Castonguay tried to do yesterday was point out seven recent examples of Ethereum’s L2 strategy at work:

And earlier today, cryptoasset data provider CryptoCompare commented on how Ethereum has outperformed Bitcoin during the past one-month period:

Last week, crypto-focused behavior analytics startup Santiment made the following interesting observations about Ethereum whale addresses: