The battle between speed and cost, ether killers are rising?

If you want to ask which crypto project is the most useful at present, and has the most potential to completely change the way the world works from gaming, shopping, banking, etc., the answer is clear, it is Ethereum. Because Ethereum, with its revolutionary smart contracts, provides the soil and motivation for DeFi, NFT and other crazes.

However, Ethereum is not the only blockchain that supports smart contracts. When people are concerned about whether Ethereum can surpass Bitcoin, Ethereum's competitors are also launching a powerful offensive against Ethereum in the field of smart contracts.

After the upgrade of Ethereum London is completed, a large amount of ETH is burned every day, which greatly alleviates the problem of unlimited total amount. However, the old-fashioned problems remain unresolved - high gas fees and high on-chain costs for some complex interactions such as creating or trading NFTs. Although Ethereum has more upgrade plans in the future, it still suffers from high cost and slow speed. In extreme cases, transaction speeds can take several minutes or even as long as an hour. It also creates opportunities for faster, lower-cost competitors to counterattack.

Here are a few potential "ether killers", let's take a look at what characteristics they all have.

Cardano(ADA)

First of all, there is Cardano (ADA), which ranks third in market value. Its founder, Charles Hoskinson, came from the original Ethereum founding team. He created Cardano two years after Ethereum was born. The cryptocurrency website Forkast believes that “Cardano is a third-generation blockchain, which means that its advanced technology is trying to solve the problems that exist in the first and second generation blockchains (ie Bitcoin and Ethereum).”

According to reports, the Cardano project is working with the Ethiopian Ministry of Education to store the academic records of 5 million students on its blockchain to confirm their academic qualifications, which will help them study, study or work abroad. In addition to this, the team will also work on improving Ethiopia's infrastructure.

Usually the market’s impression of ADA is that the pledge rate on the chain is high, and the main force has a high degree of control over the market. As for its performance, it has not yet been proven. On September 12, Cardano will officially launch smart contracts. After this function is launched, ADA will also start to face real challenges.

Harmony(ONE)

Harmony is an ethereum competitor with a lower market cap, but has been on a tear lately. According to its official website, “Harmony is a fast open-source blockchain that runs Ethereum applications on its mainnet with 2-second transaction completion times and 100x lower fees.” That means Harmony can run the same applications faster and at a lower cost. Harmony is an open platform for user assets, collectibles, identity and governance, and its security bridge provides cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, BSC and other 3 public chains.

Currently, there are 68 applications running on the Harmony chain, including 135,000 wallet addresses holding more than $96 million in assets. In addition, there are more than 2,300 NFT artists on the chain, and their NFT sales exceed 600,000 US dollars. This is a new public chain whose ecology has just emerged, and it may become a dark horse on the public chain track.

Binance Smart Chain(BNB)

BSC is faster than Ethereum, and has solved some existing problems of Ethereum, such as reducing the cost of network usage. More importantly, BSC has its own trading platform, which provides it with a huge user base. In addition, BNB can also be used as a transaction fee to save transaction costs, and the platform uses its profits to repurchase and destroy it regularly, which also gives holders a huge motivation to HODL.

However, these strengths can also be weaknesses. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service are investigating Binance for possible wrongdoing, and while nothing has been confirmed, it still casts a cloud over its development. Controversy is nothing new for trading platforms, and Coinbase has had its share of disputes, but it settled with the CFTC after paying only $6.5 million in fees.

On a positive note, there is also the fact that BSC has become an alternative for people escaping Ethereum’s high fees. So far, BSC has successfully attracted support from existing Ethereum projects, including social media project Mithril and aviation security project Aeron. It also supports many native tokens, as well as equivalent tokens "pegged" on BSC, such as BTC and ETH, etc.

Although BSC has solved the problems of high fees and congestion in Ethereum, its high degree of centralization and regulatory risks are the biggest problems it will continue to face.

Solana (SOL)

Solana is faster, cheaper, and has fully functional smart contracts. Solana is promoted by the capital of SBF, and the limelight has completely overshadowed CZ recently. Some time ago, Solana successfully released the "DegenerativeApe Academy" series of NFTs. 10,000 monkey NFTs were sold out within 8 minutes. The series of NFTs is the dominant force in Solana NFT sales, with cumulative sales of 765,000 SOL tokens, worth approximately $122 million at current prices.

In terms of performance, Solana can process 65,000 transactions per second, which is 4,000 times faster than Ethereum, 35 times faster than XRP, 6 times faster than BSC, 3 times faster than Harmony, and 2.5 times faster than Visa. On the other hand, Solana’s per-transaction fees may only be around $0.00025.

Of course, in addition to the advantages of performance and handling fees, the promotion of the capital behind it is the most critical factor for the skyrocketing price of SOL. In June of this year, Solana received a $314 million investment led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain to further advance its technology in the field of decentralized finance. The investment took the form of purchasing SOL tokens instead of traditional stock forms, so this also It has become the driving force for these institutional investors to pull the market.

Summarize

Summarize

Ethereum 2.0 is not expected to launch until next year, and possibly as soon as late 2021 or early 2022. After the upgrade is completed, the transaction fee on the Ethereum chain may be greatly reduced, and TPS may even reach 100,000+ in theory. The king of the public chain does not have much time left for competing products. Therefore, in the next few months, the major competing products are bound to do their best to create market heat and try to get enough shares in this precious time window. market share.

It is reported that the old public chain LTC is also preparing to enter the field of smart contracts and NFT. According to the Litecoin Foundation’s official blog on Sept. 9, the Litecoin network will use the open-source platform OmniLite to introduce smart contracts, DAOs, tokenized assets, and NFT functionality on-chain.

It can be seen that during the window period when Ethereum 2.0 has not yet been upgraded, the public chain battle will enter a fierce battle for traffic grabbing, which will create a lot of opportunities for short-term speculators, and at the same time bury a lot of funds for chasing high. I hope everyone can Stay in awe of the market and do a good job of risk control.