Ethereum Price: $186.38
Ethereum Price (BTC): 0.018370 BTC
Market Cap: $20.04B
ETH Network Dominance*: 75.73%
7 Day Candle**: $197.56 / $199.00 / $180.00 / $186.38

Last week was relatively quiet in Ethereum land; the World Bank sold $33.8 million in another round of its private Ethereum blockchain bonds (not public chain activity but interesting nonetheless) and Mark Carney (Bank of England Governor) discussed the major advantages of a world reserve currency at an annual gathering of central bankers in Wyoming – drawing many parallels to that proposed by Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency. Berlin Blockchain Week also saw 88 hackathon projects submitted at ETH Berlin with a number of new projects launching on main net including Clovers.network, an NFT game that, like CryptoKitties, gives another glimpse at an increasingly likely future of decentralized virtual collectables.

Perhaps most interestingly however, was in an IPO announced by INX, a cryptocurrency exchange currently under development and being built according to SEC, FINRA and EU regulations, which will issue investors with an Ethereum ERC-20 token entitling the holder to profits of the company.

The $130 million token sale marks a major step towards a more regulated approach to fundraising on the Ethereum platform, which was marred by the bubble of 2017/18 and the subsequent failure of the vast majority of projects at that time.

Whether intended or not, the use of the term IPO in place of ICO has also attracted a great deal of attention in the cryptocurrency space and beyond, with users sharing the company’s registration statement on the SEC website. Many people were quick to draw the reader’s attention to INX’s list of investors, which includes all four of the “Magical Crypto Friends”: Ricardo Spagni, Stefan Jespers, Charlie Lee and Samson Mow. Surprisingly however, these four individuals are vocal Ethereum critics, with Jespers and Mow being self-described “Bitcoin maximalists”.

This latest Ethereum IPO serves as a reminder of two things: Firstly, the ICO craze, which put Ethereum in the spotlight over the course of 2017/18 is not at all dead and looks set to be revived in regulated IPO form. And secondly, be wary of Bitcoin maximalists falling into the “do as I say, not as a I do” category – even those who have regularly referred to Ethereum as a useless “sh*tcoin” are investing hundreds of thousands into the platform.

– Nick, Owner EthereumPrice.org

* calculated as: (ETH Market Cap / Ethereum Network Market Cap)
** open / high / low / close