Is Ethereum Losing It’s Competitive Edge?
Recently, a fellow of mine brought to my attention the massive surge of altcoins in deploying smart contracts as powered by the Ethereum blockchain and I was quick to dismissing his amazement telling him how stale it was a development and that he shouldn’t be so dazed with surprise. But while I sat back and hobnobbed down memory lane on how this blockchain revolution has panned out progressively and the strong powers Ethereum have been wielding, it dawned on me that Ethereum is no longer deploying anything special when compared to it’s golden position in recent past
Okay, let’s put it this way so we can do a critical analysis on this. What makes ETH the platform to beat?
1. Ability to support the build of dApps on it.
2. It’s ability to deploy smart contracts.
3. More scalable than the Bitcoin blockchain network.
4. Long term reputation it has built.
Now, how many of these functionalities can also be deployed by other platforms?
Looking at my first point raised about its ability to accommodate other decentralized applications being built on it, ETH is undoubtedly the first open-source blockchain protocol that allows developers to build their own dApps on it at a cost known as gas. Gas is the internal pricing for running a transaction or contract in Ethereum. This is actually while it grew so fast and rose to the second highest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after bitcoin. This gives it edge over bitcoin network and many other alts. This however is no longer a sweeping edge Ethereum has come to possess. What’s actually the cream of ETH’s business? It’s flexibility in allowing developers build dApps on it but the gas war being staged on Ethereum’s blockchain is not something that I think ETH can continue with in the long term. Recently, there are many projects in the cryptospace which can comfortably support the build of dApps on them while many others yet to deploy this functionality are racing against time to launch this function on their blockchain. As a matter of fact, one of the most recent emerging altcoin which is EOS is termed the “Eth killer” not just because it can allow devs to build dApps on it but also has been able to work on Ethereum’s major weakness of rising gas cost experienced on the Ethereum blockchain. The more complex the commands you wish to execute on the Ethereum network, the more gas (and Ether) you have to pay. EOS is able to work on this by eliminating transactions cost when working on its blockchain. Devs can simply build dapps and deploy smart contracts on the EOS blockchain without any transactions cost attached. This is achieved by simply by holding EOS. Which is why I think NEO, which has the City of Zion; a large community of devs working voluntarily to make the NEO blockchain and ecosystem better. And of course emerging altcoins like the EOS. NEO and and several others like EOS are strongly winking at ETH to wake up or be dethroned.
Point number 2 talks about ETH being able to deploy smart contracts. Well, many other platforms now has these functions, soon WAVES is launching that functionality, Tronix is leaving the ETH blockchain to become an independent blockchain which I’m very much sure smart contracts function will be one of the features of the new TRX blockchain simply because it would be absurd not to have that when the future is all about smart contracts. And of course many others are deploying this feature. “The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts. Together, we will learn from and build upon the only smart contract supporting blockchain currently running in real-world production — Ethereum — to define enterprise-grade software capable of handling the most complex, highly demanding applications at the speed of business.” This is the watchword of the EEA. They boast of ETH being the “only smart contract supporting blockchain”. How true is this at this moment? Well, with the point I made above, this statement of theirs is rendered obsolete. Does this make ETH peculiar anymore? You can answer that.
What about Point 3 talking about the scalability of ETH’s blockchain as it bragged to be better than that of Bitcoin’s? This is almost laughable for ETH now. During the ICO boom of early 2018 when ETH was madly sought after as Ethereum blockchain became the “go-to” for all new projects and the majority of altcoins that sprung up were mostly based on the now well-known ERC-20 protocol, this led to a congestion that was very disastrous and ugly to business. With the present roughly 15 transactions per second (tps) that Ethereum presently accommodates compared to, say, the 45,000 processed by Visa vis a viz other platforms that are a million times more scalable than the Ethereum blockchain, so much concerns are propping up if Ethereum really could survive the future. One of these other alts with massive speed in transactions processing is the Nano formerly called Railblocks [XRB] (although this is not actually built on a blockchain but tangle technology. Another in this category is the IOTA). IOST, Cardano, NEO and many others are already more scalable than the ETH blockchain. I am very much aware of sharding as the solution to this problem as proposed by Vitalik Buterin, which is not exactly trustless since, in this model, nodes need to rely on other nodes for transactions to be validated and verified. Does this make ETH peculiar anymore? You can answer that.
Point number 4 talks about long term reputation and goodwill. This is actually a big deal for ETH. This allows many bodies and institutions think first about ETH should they conceive infusing blockchain tech into their business. This is something to beat. An advantage and a medal for Ethereum.
In fact, the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) is a very powerful body with big corporations that supports the Ethereum network boasting of captains of industries like Microsoft, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Intel, Santander etc. Others will have to work their heads off to get this badge of honour and reputation ETH has meticulously achieved over the years. But I still look at this with a different shade. Decentralization as a revolution of this time facilitates dApp building and blockchain movement across the globe with the ugly impedance of centralized bodies being obtrusive in this developmental revolution. But I still get bothered at the alarming rate of tokens peeling out of the ETH blockchain. So many of them are pretty much scams and shit tokens or should I say shitcoins. Comparing the failure turnover of tokens on ETH network, you would see very few of them have passed the acid test and are now doing well. Comparing ETH’s vis a viz with tokens on NEO, you will agree with me that something very urgent has to be done in this regard.
Will Ethereum remain in its enviable position? Let;s continue to see what the future unveils.
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