Legendary Investor: Crypto is Seeing Highest Developer Activity Since Internet

Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said that the company has not seen the level of developer activity the cryptocurrency sector has demonstrated in recent years since the rise of the Internet in the nineties.

While most blockchain networks are currently inferior to centralized alternatives, Horowitz stated that as was the case with smartphones and computers a decade ago, eventually, crypto will find ways to become more efficient and compete against existing platforms.

"I think that there is probably more developer activity in crypto than in anything we've seen since the Internet and the right way to think about it is, it's a new computing platform. Once every decade or two, a new computing platform comes along. The thing that is deceptive about is that when the new platform at the time is generally worse in most ways than the old platform but has some new capabilities," Horowitz explained.

Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin, the most dominant cryptocurrency in the global market, has been described as the first killer application of the blockchain as it became the first widely accepted decentralized currency that is used as an alternative to fiat currencies like the US dollar.

Although the blockchain in its current form is slower and more inefficient than existing computing platforms, Horowitz stated that the potential of blockchain technology is truly endless because of its ability to eliminate trust between multiple parties.

On the blockchain, with cryptocurrencies, developers are able to build decentralized applications that are censorship-resistant and decentralized, which allows the creation of applications that were not possible to build before, such as peer-to-peer and consensus currencies.

"I don't know any good Ethereum developer that isn't a millionaire, and it's only a matter of time before it will become a gold rush among developers to learn the technology."

Currently, the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector is in an experimental adoption phase, wherein merchants, large-scale conglomerates, and businesses are demonstrating an increase in interest towards the technology and conducting pilot tests to potentially commercialize the blockchain at a large-scale.

Various improvements are being made at the protocol level, as seen in the implementation of Lightning in Bitcoin and Sharding, Plasma in Ethereum, and proof-of-stake blockchain systems have started to emerge as alternatives to proof-of-work blockchain networks.

The continuous increase in the level of developer activity in the cryptocurrency sector will lead to growing adoption and integration, especially as regulatory frameworks around crypto are solidified and standardized in the months to come across major regions.