The cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, Ether, is now worth more than £287bn.
Its rise is impressive when compared to Bitcoin, the world’s biggest crypto asset, which has seen its value increase by more than 480pc in the past 12 months.
Not everyone is convinced, however.
But the Ethereum network, unlike Bitcoin, also allows applications or “smart contracts”, to be built on top of it.
“For the first time in my life I had some money and was thinking about investments,” he says.
It also provides a portal to “De-Fi” services such as savings products or trading apps, which are built by other crypto companies.
Other decentralised technologies built using Ethereum have raised eyebrows.
The European Investment Bank last month issued a digital bond on the Ethereum blockchain worth €100m with the central bank of France.
“Bitcoin and Ethereum are now moving more independently than before,” says Deane of Quantum Economics, and Ethereum projects are attracting “adoption and use on their own merit”.
In 2016, the hack of an Ethereum-based project called the DAO saw $50m stolen and forced Ethereum’s development team to perform a “hard fork”, in effect a reset, that restored stolen funds.
Its backers are currently making efforts to upgrade the network to Eth2, which they hope will mean it uses less computational power and therefore less energy.