This alarm bell went off in my head as well. Why now? I'm never mad at a company changing focus, but at such a critical /uncertain time, given blocksize/halving/eth competition concerns, why? Is someone aware of something we don't know? Because this transition is not free, capital and manhours will be spent to accommodate this rebranding/restructuring. and given how shrewdly this company has been ran, I don't expect a capital outlay without commiserate return.
Brian Armstrong has been a strong advocate of on chain scaling. In fact, Theymos banned his support people who were trying to help people with deposits on /r/bitcoin for something Brian said on Twitter about bigger blocksizes (not /r/bitcoin). Based on that and the way Blockstream ignored exchanges it has been my belief for awhile that Brian has had his eyes open for what would satisfy onchain scaling and be adoptable by the masses. (All my theory).
Ethereum volume has been hard to ignore - it looks like he's taking a big risk. Even R0ACH says if bitcoin doesn't go up significantly pre-halving that it can be considered a failure ... it's looking to me like it's going to go down which in conjunction with the halving of rewards could pull miners off and overload the already overloaded blockchain.
Which could be bad.
Watch things closely over the next several weeks.
