Last Updated on February 25, 2024
Ethereum is, like Bitcoin, a technology that lets you send cryptocurrency to anyone for a small fee. More significantly, Ethereum lets people build powerful, decentralized applications on top of its blockchain network—the distributed computing system at its core—that everyone can use and no one can takedown. First outlined in a 2013 white paper by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum launched in 2015.
Ethereum has been on fire, but this move isn’t sustainable. If you’re wondering why Ethereum is outperforming, look no further than decentralized finance (Defi). Defi is a financially focused blockchain that utilizes intelligent contracts — protocols that help verify, facilitate, and enforce negotiated contracts — and eliminates other financial intermediaries that can slow or block payments, such as banks. Ethereum’s smart contracts are prevalent and have become the foundation from which Defi is being developed. Ethereum price history can guide you in best way to join it as soon as possible.
Ethereum’s underlying blockchain has also had plenty of interest from the business community. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which aims to broaden the adoption of Ethereum’s smart-contract-driven blockchain technology, has more than 200 members.
Furthermore, Ethereum has seen its average daily transactions steadily rise over the past year. While this is seemingly encouraging, it’s a massive stretch to suggest that Ethereum is worth close to $400 billion.
According to the Nilson Report, to put this into some perspective, Visa handled nearly 453 million daily transactions in 2018. Ethereum’s blockchain has been handling closer to 1.5 million daily of late. Yet, despite this mile-wide disparity, Ethereum’s market value trails Visa by only $100 billion.
What’s more, blockchain suffers from a Catch-22. Businesses are unwilling to switch away from traditional networks without proof that blockchain-based technology can hold up in the real world. Unfortunately, without big businesses making this shift, no concrete data proves that Ethereum’s blockchain is the definitive answer to existing infrastructure.
Trupanion
A third game-changing growth stock to buy instead of Ethereum is pet-focused health insurance company. Americans love their four-legged family members and are more than willing to spend big bucks to ensure their well-being. According to the American Pet Products Association data, nearly $110 billion will be spent on pets in the U.S. this year. More importantly, it’s been over a quarter of a century since we’ve witnessed a year-over-year decline in pet expenditures. It may not be the fastest-growing industry, but it’s about as steady as they come.
Trupanion is sitting on a veritable gold mine in the pet space. Only about 1% of U.S. pet owners have purchased insurance on their cat or dog, well below what we see in other developed countries. If the U.S. were to match the 25% penetration rate seen in the U.K., it would mark a close to $33 billion addressable markets for Trupanion. For some context, the company generated a sliver over $500 million in sales last year.
Even though the companion animal insurance space is bound to get crowded, Trupanion has spent the past two decades building rapport and partnerships with veterinarians and clinics. These invaluable connections, coupled with its leading software capable of paying clinics at the time of checkout, give it a clear competitive advantage.
Trupanion is still in the very early innings of its growth, which is great news for investors.
Earlier this year, the company’s stock price had soared by nearly 60% on a year-to-date basis and had more than doubled from a year earlier, with some investors seemingly mistaking the ticker for the token of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethan Allen went public in 1993 with the ETH symbol. The “change will better differentiate Ethan Allen news from Ethereum news in search results, as Ethereum is often abbreviated as ETH.