Solana has steered its way to the very elite ranks, a feat once pulled by Chainlink and Binance’s platform and cross chain token – BNB. Oh wait, Fantom and Polygon are also moving towards the same direction. Two things are common with four of these projects; smart contracts and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). One giving birth to another, blockchains with smart contract support are suddenly common.
Just when ethereum’s success starts to tear down its efficiency, alternatives are trooping in, one after the other. If you don’t have special attachments to a particular project, you could easily do without the ethereum blockchain.
NFTs, DeFi, smart contracts…these new offsprings of ethereum have it all; some few shortcomings but hey, that’s what growth is all about. The birth of platforms like these kicked off the ‘Ethereum Killer’ campaigns.
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Very popular amongst ethereum skeptics; an ‘ethereum killer’ is a term coined for novel projects with smart contract compatibility and support for building decentralized applications which are expected to eclipse ethereum; economically and in terms of adoption and application.
To be fair; at a time when the ethereum blockchain is becoming a pain to use, using these alternatives feels great. In contrast to Ethereum, these cross chains and alternative smart contract platforms are cheaper and faster – generally more efficient. My favourite cross chain project – Fantom executes transactions at lightning speed and cost less than a penny to execute the costliest smart contract transactions.
Despite these breakthroughs by Ethereum-like projects, the ‘Ethereum killer’ phrase is almost a joke term thrown around as a sarcasm. Ethereum has instead soared together with these spin-offs. These ethereum killers are in fact not ‘reinvented wheels’ but instead of eclipsing ethereum, they have turned out to be important ‘ethereum helpers’ and the search for a proper ethereum killer has continued.
Apart from enjoying the ‘first to market’ benefits, Ethereum’s resistance to these competitions is thanks to its originality, maximalist orientations, the fact that it houses the most reputable projects and the pronounced instability of alternative projects. The latter is the main reason for the former.
Ethereum alternatives; Solana and Fantom have recently experienced downtime while Binance’s Smart Chain has been dubbed ‘centralized". These issues make many users stick to Ethereum; a ‘better evil’, they termed it.
Ethereum’s supreme reign continues; not for so long anymore as it looks set to eclipse itself. Yeah, Ethereum is the new ethereum killer.
Alternative projects have survived mainly off the fact that they offer a faster and cheaper platform than Ethereum’s Layer-1. But they are hindered by their inability to achieve the same level of stability as the ethereum blockchain and also inability to offset ethereum ‘first to market’ privileges and as well convince ethereum maximalists and existing projects that they are a better platform to build on.
But this doesn’t get rid of the fact that Ethereum’s Layer-1 is congested, expensive and simply inefficient. With this in mind, developers are starting to develop ethereum’s second layer, a faster and cheaper platform.
Relative to cross chain speed and cheapness, second layer projects offer an alternative to Ethereum on Ethereum. Layer-2 comprises of a collection of infrastructures designed to take the bulk of your activities on the ethereum blockchain away from the main net. Moving away from the main net and utilizing scalability infrastructures gives projects built on layer-2 certain clear-cut advantages.
Leveraging cleverly built resources, Layer-2 projects are building sustainable facilities on the decentralized layer of the most used and innovative blockchain till date. This fast-growing space is welcoming completely new projects as well as existing projects delving into the second layer to build a more efficient version of their products.
Mute is building a proper DeFi platform on Ethereum’s layer-2 – the first of its kind. To further enhance efficiency; it is leveraging the extremely powerful Zero Knowledge (ZK) Rollup protocol to process transactions faster and with added security.
ZK-Rollups play the ‘exit game’ ingeniously and perfects the shift from Ethereum’s congested layer-1 while ensuring better functionality than the closely related ‘optimistic rollups’. Mute puts the best tools together and adds more to this through its own uniquely crafted solutions such as a special privacy layer which conceals transactions on its DeFi platform – Mute switch.
Coinbase and Binance have joined forces with other reputable projects to support zKSync, a Layer-2 project working to improve ethereum blockchain’s scalability without sacrificing security. When launched, projects building on Layer-2 will be equipped with even more resources to develop scalable, fast, secure and cheap solutions on Ethereum’s Layer-2 – the new Ethereum killer.
Ethereum mainnet continue to suffer from its long-lasting problems, cross-chain solutions are yet to stir free from their biggest problems. Layer-2 projects are positioned for a dramatic ascension. Just like the cross-chain wave, Layer-2 projects are set to take the space by the wind. In contrast to cross-chains, layer-2 projects flaunt a ‘near perfect’ back-end.
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