Speculation on the Aeternity Debut

It has been three months since Aeternity's Phase One round and the masses are starting to get restless. Snarky reddit posts such as this are starting to show that the speculators are increasingly vocal about their desire to start trading AE tokens.

The team has been clearly busy. On top of organized talks and meetups around the world, Zach Hess, the technical lead for the project, has been furiously churning code into the Aeternity codebase. As evidenced here, lots of code are being pushed into the testnet repo, every single day.

Trading on IOUs

Prior to any of the public chain being deployed, some people are already trading AE pre-release IOUs on HitBTC. After spiking to over $3 per token, it has recently settled into trading between $0.6 and $0.9 per token. Some traders have asked whether it was worth it to buy the IOUs now or wait until AE public chain gets deployed.

Start Speculating, Already!

So here goes with the speculation --

^{@ofrbg says we're all just speculative swine!}

According to the contribution page, 227 million tokens were created during the two phrases. Accounting for 8.5% going to the core team and devs, that bumps the number to roughly 248m. When Aeternity drops, it'll be a fully working chain, albeit with many of the features still coming. That's a lot more than you can say for EOS or Tezos, ideology aside, which are looking at valuation in the billion dollar range.

Due to this, I'm inclined to think that Aeternity will debut in the top 20 on CoinMarket Cap. Right now, #20 is ByteCoin at $356m market cap. So assuming Aeternity opens with a market cap a hair above it at $357m, this would mean that each token would trade at roughly $1.44 (357/248) give or take 25 cents.

Obviously, the market cap estimation would depend on an investor's valuation of the technology and the market potential for the chain. Assuming a market size of 248 million tokens, here's a chart of how much AE would be worth at market cap milestones.

Market Cap vs Price Table

Market Cap	Rank	Price
$1 Billion	8	$4.03
$500 Million	13	$2.02
$300 Million	25	$1.21
$200 Million	32	$0.81
$100 Million	45	$0.40

Updates from the Aeternity team can be found here.

These are assumptions based on publicly released in formation by the Aeternity team. If any of this is incorrect, feel free to comment. I will do my best to revise based on updated information.