Solidi is now buying and selling Ethereum! Ethereum is the undisputed No 1 smart contract crypto which is the underpinning of all Defi (decentralised finance).

What is Ethereum?

Ethereum is the world’s second biggest crypto currency by market capitalisation. Unlike Bitcoin, it supports ‘smart contracts’ which enable complicated financial contracts to be drawn up and run independantly of any centralised organisation.

A smart contract could be as simple as locking up some crypto currency until a specific time in the future. Or a complicated insurance contract which accepts monthly payments from customers and has multiple independent third parties able to control claims and pay-outs. It could even be an open source community run insurance contact, removing the need for insurance brokers and ensuring the best deal for the insured parties.

Why invest in Ethereum?

Defi – Decentralised Finance (Defi) is the big think in the crypto world in 2020. And Ethereum is the undisputed king of Decentralised Finance. It is used to list hundreds of ERC-20 tokens, but more importantly it also powers the vast majority of smart contracts that run decentralised financial services such as UniSwap.

As these services develop, Ethereum is going to become the critical crypto currency of 2020 and beyond.

Volume – Ethereum’s 24 hour volume is huge. Although Bitcoin’s Market Cap(italisation) is 410% greater than Ethereum, the daily volume is only 171% higher. Put another way, Ethereum does 88% more trading versus Bitcoin. Now statistics never tell the full story and can of course be manipulated, but what is clear is that Ethereum is seeing a huge level of adoption and use.

Development – Ethereum has a solid core developer team behind it and a track record. This places it well ahead of many of the other smart contract crypto currencies which smaller teams with less experience.

Why be cautious?

Scalability – Ethereum, like many crypto currencies (including Bitcoin), has scalability issues that developers are still trying to solve. These result in transactions taking a long time to complete or the fees for sending crypto being quite high. While Bitcoin can view its limited block size and thus transaction capacity as a feature as it encourages people to not trade and instead hodl, Ethereum depends on the network capacity to make Smart Contracts work. Smart contracts are what gives Ethereum its value – if smart contracts are too expensive to use due to network fees (known as Gas Price in Ethereum) then Ethereum may present less value. However, the core developers of Ethereum are working hard on scalability.

Stability – Ethereum is less stable than Bitcoin with significant on-going development work. Changes are rolled out faster than on Bitcoin with less regard for the stability of the network – but this should lead to a more usable crypto.

Complexity – Smart Contract development is very complex and a number, such as the famous DAO have gone significantly wrong. While Ethereum is secure, contracts developed on Ethereum can be very insecure and so you should be careful about using Ethereum to invest in smart contracts.

Why use Solidi to Invest in Ethereum?

• Simplicity – With Solidi you can get started in less than 5 minutes. Our online address check takes less than 60 seconds to complete.
• Pricing – The cheapest place in the UK to instantly buy/sell Ethereum.
• Stability & Backing – Solidi has been trading since 2015 and is supported by the University of Cambridge Judge Business School start-up programme.
• Security – Solidi uses its own 100% cold storage solution keeping your funds safe from hackers. Unlike many of our competitors, we don’t use third parties to store your crypto.
• Telephone support – one of the only UK exchanges to offer it!
• Great reviews – Trustpilot, QuickPenquin, Bitcopy to name a few.

Questions? Leave a comment below or contact our team directly.