As the bear market rages on, with Bitcoin collapsing down to 7,400 after double topping at 11,700. This collapse has pulled down the rest of the market and many cryptocurrencies are hit hard. Ethereum is one of them. From an ETHBTC ratio of just 0.12 in the start of February, the ratio collapsed in March to 0.75 and held steady, before falling again to 0.62. While Bitcoin dropped from 11,700 to 7,400, a 36% drop, Ether dropped from 870 to 460, a 47% drop.

Ethereum’s accelerated freefall has perplexed many investors. Ethereum can do so much more than Bitcoin with its smart contracts and higher transaction throughput. Ethereum has a well defined roadmap and is making consistent progress on it. The Plasma sidechain protocol will soon be released, with OmiseGo being the first Plasma sidechain. Phase 1 of the sharding spec is complete. Casper, Ethereum’s Proof of Stake upgrade, is also well on its way.

Besides a solid protocol roadmap, Ethereum also has the most powerful ecosystem of all other cryptocurrencies. For example, ConsenSys is a large company built around growing Ethereum’s ecosystem. Consensys manages a sizeable portfolio of companies building projects on Ethereum’s ecosystem. The portfolio includes projects like Gnosis, Airswap, Infura, GRID+, and Metamask. Besides ConsenSys projects, there many other high quality projects building on Ethereum’s ecosystem. They include 0x, MakerDAO, Havven, dydx, Augur, and Dharma.

So why exactly is Ethereum falling so hard?

The main reason, in my opinion, is the greed of 2017 rearing it’s ugly head on Ethereum. Ethereum’s platform was host to a ton of ICOs, games, and scams. Many people participated in them hoping to make a quick buck. ICOs like Filecoin, Tezos, and EOS raised hundreds of millions of dollars in Ether. EOS’s ICO is still happening as we speak. Greed also brought people to participate in questionable games like CryptoCountries and CryptoCelebrities. These “games” were setup exactly like Ponzi schemes, and yet people poured thousands of Ether into them. Finally, greed also led people to participate in blatant scams like EtherTanks, PonziCoin, and Proof of Weak Hands Coin.

What do you think these entities will do after receiving so much Ether from greedy Ethereum investors when the market starts dumping? They’ll dump harder.

For example, there is strong proof that EOS, an ICO that has raised more than 400,000 Ether, is dumping it on the market right now. The EOS crowdsale wallet has sent more than 163,000 Ether in total to Bitfinex’s wallet, 50,000 of which was sent in the last 12 hours. It’s incredibly perplexing how Ethereum’s community has not yet outright rejected EOS. EOS is like a leech on Ethereum’s ecosystem, taking Ether to fund its operations in ORDER TO BUILD A PLATFORM TO REPLACE ETHEREUM. How do Ethereum investors find this acceptable at all? In fact, the co-founder of EOS, Dan Larimer, has openly challenged Vitalik Buterin on the efficacy of Ethereum many times in the past. It’s clear that Larimer has little love for Ethereum.

Now that he has his hands on 400,000+ Ether, what do you think he would do? HODL it to keep Ethereum’s investors happy?

Moving forward

I think it’s clear that the Ethereum community needs to put its foot down and reject any ICOs that try to raise capital with Ether. The best asset to raise capital with is stablecoins, such as Dai, and the community should actively encourage any new ICOs to do so. If most ICOs had raised capital with stablecoins, we would not be in this situation where the price of Ether is at the mercy of so many overnight whales.

The community should also actively police scams on the platform. Scams like EtherTanks and Proof of Weak Hands Coin should be quickly reported and labeled as such. Not only are they immediately unhealthy for the platform as they scam investors out of their Ether, they’re unhealthy for the platform in the long term as the scammers sell their Ether on the markets.

The bright side in all this is that Ethereum will survive and it has, without a doubt, the strongest development team, strongest roadmap, and strongest ecosystem of all other cryptocurrencies out there. If anyone really took a deep dive into what people are building on Ethereum, it’s a no-brainer that if cryptocurrencies don’t collapse as an asset class, Ethereum will thrive.