Ethereum has been on fire lately and this coincided with the rise of non-fungible tokens and decentralised apps (DApps). The cryptocurrency – which makes great use of smart contracts – is the second most valuable coin after bitcoin. In the past two years, ETH has gone through an intense bull rush in the market as can be seen in the ETH block explorer but it is not the only one. On trading sites, it shows that Ethereum, despite being on a positive trend, has competitors.
These Ethereum competitors are real and seemingly here to stay. A good one is Solana, which advertises itself as Ethereum but with lower transaction costs and faster speed. Ethereum aims to rectify this, however, with its Ethereum 2.0 upgrade coming in the first quarter of 2022. Due to Solana still being on the rise, it is pretty obvious that the Ethereum network is the superior one when it comes to the security and quality of DApps in the blockchain ecosystem. That does not mean Solana and other risers like Cardona and NEAR should be ignored especially regarding gas fees.
Solana got an increment of monthly active developers that was almost 5 times the number in the prior year (from December 2020 to December 2021.) NEAR was the next closest at 4 times the previous year. Polygon, Cosmos, and BSC all also had rapid rates of growth, with Binance Smart Chain having an 80% rise throughout the past year. Polygon has twice the developers it used to have and Cosmos got a 70% boost through the span of the year.
Solana is more scalable than Ethereum thanks to the mode of its consensus mechanism. It makes transactions faster and in a sequential manner, unlike Ethereum and Bitcoin due to the better total memory support of SOL stateless architecture. Ethereum’s focus on decentralisation also differs from Solana’s primary focus, which is improving output. Solana is one of the fastest layer-one blockchains due to its tools network. It has a record 60k transactions in a second which is just bonkers to think about. Compared to that, Ethereum does a paltry 15 transactions in a second at maximum. Its layer-one might be lacking, but ETH’s layer-two has more diversity in function with Validium, rollups, and state channels. Multi-chain networks also aid Ethereum scaling while never adversely affecting its security.
Ethereum has its benefits over Solana as well. The technology behind the Ethereum network is much more varied than its counterparts such as Solana. It pioneered the mainstream use of on-chain smart contracts (supported by Solidity’s language programming) which has been massive for crypto trade on the blockchain ecosystem using the Turing-complete language. Ethereum is also, for the most part, a more secure blockchain network than any of its competitors. This is obviously important due to the minacious acts of malefactors or unforeseen technical glitches that could lead to thousands worth of dollars being lost or held.
This is just one of the coins coming for Ethereum’s throne in the digital sphere. Not much is known about the smaller coins like NEAR, Avalanche, and Cardona. Even with the large popularity of Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are many people who still struggle to grasp the general concept or how they work on the blockchain ecosystem. The understanding of these smaller crypto coins is even less, with people more likely to trade ETH online on https://redot.com/eth2/ than Cosmos or Terra. Solana is kind of mainstream to a certain extent, so it is the only rising Ethereum competitor not bound by this problem.
Ethereum remains prevalent
Don’t get me wrong, this does not mean the Ethereum ecosystem is dying or bad. In fact, the developer ecosystem for ETH is the most prosperous at the moment, beating out its rivals by a lot. That being said, these Ethereum competitors are growing at a more rapid rate than Ethereum did. Based on data from Electric Capital, a company that specialises in crypto research, rivals on the developer ecosystem like BSC (Binance Smart Chain), Solana, and Polkadot are mobbing at a higher rate of development on the blockchain. Over four thousand open-source developers use the Ethereum ecosystem which dwarfs that of BTC (over 600) as well as Cosmos and Solana (a thousand) and even Polkadot (1500), which is the best of the rest. Analysis showed that Ethereum is by far the top developer ecosystem in blockchain development. It is followed by Polkadot, then Cosmos and Solana. Bitcoin round up the top 5.
In the area of NFTs, Ethereum, despite not being the one to start NFTs on the blockchain, did a lot to make the technology necessary to make digital assets in the form of collectibles. The network’s high security helped leverage the use of scarce collectibles with more trust. Stablecoins equate to one unit of a fiat currency. Knowing this, it is easy to see why they are the heart of the decentralised ecosystem. Defi needs stablecoins because of the unpredictable nature of cryptocurrencies on the market. Ethereum has a solid stablecoin.
Near and Cosmos are other Ethereum alternatives on the blockchain system that are being favoured by developers. The number of new developers in web3.0 that began using ETH network tools has gone up by 20% of the total; a huge number. So, even though crypto coins like Avalanche, Terra, NEAR, and Solana are doing better than Ethereum did when at the same time in both coins’ development in the blockchain ecosystem, it is clear that Ethereum still reigns supreme as things stand. Ethereum’s decentralised finance is just too motley to stop climbing to higher heights. Of course, this is partly due to it being longer in the game than Cardona, Solana, NEAR, and the rest, but it is still positive for ETH. Moreover, competition on the blockchain network and developer ecosystem can only be a good thing. It is great to have many solid coins because it gives us, the crypto adopters, a wide-ranging array of choices. These many solid cryptocurrency coins will only serve to advance blockchain development.
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