Market value is what 2 parties are willing to buy and sell something for. Just because VERI is priced in ETH does not mean that it always has to be purchased with ETH. In fact, Mercatox lets you buy with BTC. And I could offer you fiat for your VERI and I could even setup a USD/VERI exchange. After much consideration, I see no reason why the market cap of VERI couldn't exceed the market cap of ETH on a lasting basis.
If ETH is used just as gas for Veritas, then sure its market cap can exceed ETH's.
Does Mercatox make the BTC:VERI exchange without going thru ETH?
That is, Mercatox does
not accept your BTC, exchange BTC for ETH, then exchange ETH for VERI, and give you your VERI?
In other words, Mercatox (and the USD/VERI exchange that you set up) simply accept your BTC (or USD) and gives you VERI without selling BTC (or USD) for ETH and then selling ETH for VERI?
Can you see the process here?
One of them takes just 1 process in a single transaction.
The other takes 3 processes in a single transaction.
If the exchanges can do 1 process per transaction (no 2 internal processes hidden from view), then yes, Veritas' market cap can exceed eth's and go on to compete with bitcoin's.
I can see the possibility, but ethereum's smart contract network would (I speculate) need to incorporate other cryptocurrencies (not erc20 tokens, but standalone cryptocurrencies) into its smart contract structure.
This would require the need for 2 (or more) different blockchains to be able to communicate with each other (using a super protocol) for any transaction between the different cryptocurrencies.
The different blockchains need to be somewhat linked to maintain an overall trustless network, or else we would have to rely on 3rd-party trust.
And if so, is such smart contract structure/super protocol (to include other cryptocurrencies) being done now by ethereum developers?
If not, then I suspect Veritas' market cap (along with other ERC20 tokens' market caps) will remain
capped by eth's market cap.
Edit:
At the moment, the price of Veritas is very dependent on eth because we only have ETH:VERI to refer to when trading it.
We don't have BTC:VERI without taking into consideration BTC:ETH and ETH:VERI first.
This may create the confusion to the intellectually uninitiated to interpret my comment to mean that Veritas' value is based on eth, and not on Veritas' business model, but that's not what I mean.
If we take out eth from the equation, how will the market determine the price of Veritas relative to other standalone cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, dash, etc?
If we don't have ETH to refer to, how do we determine BTC:VERI?
We don't.
And of course, Veritas' market cap can still compete with bitcoin's, but only after the flippening whereby ethereum's market cap far exceeds bitcoin's.
Then we can see Veritas' market cap exceed bitcoin's, but not ethereum's.
Because as I keep saying, a fish cannot grow larger than its aquarium.
And if you want to use highway + vehicles as example.... a vehicle cannot grow larger than the highway its on.
You can be smart alec and argue how the vehicle can be innovative/efficient/etc, but you are just missing the point entirely.