Will There Be A Real Ethereum Killer?

Ethereum is a real game-changer. Since its inception many years ago, Ethereum has matured to become a monster in the crypto space. Unlike Bitcoin and other older-gen altcoins, Ethereum has a native capability to create smart contracts. This is especially important because it allows the crypto ecosystem to create something that was not thinkable before. 

For example, decentralized games, decentralized finance, and decentralized exchange. Yes, they are all popular now, thanks to Ethereum. If you don’t know much about Ethereum, you might want to click here to check the article.

However, Ethereum’s rise to celebrity status also asked one very important question. Is it scalable enough? At its current state, Ethereum is not able to process more than 25 transactions per second. The limit looks even more obvious now more than ever after it gets tested to the max with DeFi-based transactions and DEX trades. 

The transaction fees get much more expensive, and the average waiting time is much slower too. People started to look for alternatives. Will there ever be a real Ethereum killer? Well, let’s analyze the closest candidates.

Cardano (ADA)

Cardano was founded by Ethereum co-founder, Charles Hoskinson, and it’s perhaps the most hyped Ethereum competitor right now. Cardano uses Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake, which is a unique form of Delegated Proof-of-Stake. Cardano also has its own smart contract programming language called Plutus Core. 

Cardano has been hyped even more recently with its Shelley mainnet upgrade that would allow the users to stake their ADA tokens. The price of ADA kept rising, and now it sits on the 7th position of coin market cap rankings comfortably. Whether Cardano will be able to overthrow Ethereum or not remains to be seen. Cardano is still untested, and there’s no running Dapp here.

Tron (TRX)

If there’s a live candidate that can overtake Ethereum, Tron is perhaps that candidate. Compared to other Ethereum-killers, Tron’s DApp community is pretty much alive and well. Tron has been one of the top 3 DApp platforms for quite some time, and it has also expanded its journey to cover the recent DeFi craze.

Previously, Tron’s DApps ecosystem was usually only around gambling applications.And yes, just like Cardano, Tron also utilizes a more modern consensus mechanism. Tron adopts a Delegated Proof-of-Stake, like EOS, but with more Super Representatives. Tron’s advantage over Ethereum is its speed and its cheap transaction fees. However, until today, most people still don’t really trust Tron and its founder, Justin Sun.

Cosmos (ATOM)

One of the brightest dark horses is definitely Cosmos Network. Cosmos calls itself the “internet of blockchains” because its Tendermint Core Engine allows enterprises to start their own blockchain under one same ecosystem (which is Cosmos). Cosmos rose to popularity after its Tendermint was forked to create Binance Chain (BNB).

However, it is still able to maintain its relevance nowadays due to the rising DeFi platforms that utilize Cosmos, such as IRISnet and others. It’s predicted that Cosmos would be able to rise to top 10-15 market cap rankings in the near future, although it would be hard to overtake Ethereum.

Polkadot (DOT)

This is perhaps one of the biggest hypes of 2020. Created by Ethereum’s former CTO, Gavin Wood, Polkadot is a very promising and fast public blockchain platform with various “parachains” to support one same ecosystem. Projects that utilize Polkadot include Stafi, Edgeware, and Kusama.

Even though DOT itself is not yet transferable, top exchanges like Huobi and OKEx have enabled its IOU tokens to be traded. Recently, Binance also announced that it would accept premature DOT deposits. It looks like they will compete with the big boys right from the beginning. 

Conclusion

Out of these candidates, none of them has any mature DApp ecosystem compared to Ethereum. It looks like Ethereum still has a very good head start due to its massive stablecoin and DeFi ecosystems. If Ethereum can keep its momentum with the launch of Ethereum 2.0, it would be hard for these dark horses to convince crypto traders to move to their platforms.If you are interested to discover Ethereum even more, you can click this link.