I was purchasing some domains with Ethereum yesterday and ran out of funds in my wallet and went to Coinbase to buy some more ETH. The price was approaching $3000 and I thought to myself, “the demand side of this network is exploding.”

The way crypto-networks work is that the supply side gets built first with incentives to mine, validate, stake, etc. This has been going on for over a decade now. People started mining Bitcoin twelve years ago.

The demand side of most crypto-networks has been dominated by buying, holding, and speculating for those twelve years. There is nothing wrong with that. Buying, holding, and speculating has provided the funding to pay for building out the supply side of these networks.

But I think that is changing now, certainly with Ethereum and a number of other crypto-networks. You need ETH to do things on the Ethereum network. And people are doing things on it; buying domains, peer-to-peer lending, buying art, racing horses, etc.

The more people use ETH, the more the demand side grows, and the value of Ethereum goes up.

Of course, we could be witnessing another speculative wave, but it feels different to me this time. I think the demand side is taking off now.

Disclosure: Long ETH personally and professionally