TL;DR 5 Sentence Summary - Vitalik Buterin on Scaling Ethereum, Its Popularity in Asia

Twelve months ago, when the price of Ethereum's token Ether was around $14, a smart contract to set up a freelancer profile on Ethlance cost less than $1. As the price of Ether started to surge beyond $250, Ethlance freelancers were required to pay around $8 to set up their profiles.

According to Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation and its development team recently asked writers to reduce their gas prices and some of them have agreed to do so to ensure that users are not required to spend upwards of $8 per smart contract.

Another long-term solution or development plan the Ethereum Foundation is looking into is the possibility of switching the consensus protocol of Ethereum from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, connecting Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics and technology vendors with Ethereum, recently announced its expansion into China with a new office in Hangzhou.

"There definitely is a fairly large Chinese Ethereum community and there are several companies based in Shanghai and Hangzhou that have been working on Ethereum applications for a couple of years. There has been increasing amount of interest in the technology and the platform. In general, it is continuing to grow," said Buterin.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Despite all of the negative press Ethereum's gotten lately for the ICOs and network congestion, it's still one of the most transparent platform that's rigorously engaged with the Blockchain community. Ethereum exploded in price quicker than anticipated and I think a lot of people need to understand that Ethereum is still only in Phase 2 of their 4 phase roadmap. Scaling is being worked out and it's hard to expect an incomplete product to be able to do everything now.

Ethereum also has a very large lead as a decentralized platform for applications and it'll be interesting to see how EOS and Tezos plan on interjecting themselves into that space. The Blockchain future is heating up!