“All the Ethereum killers from back in the day didn’t succeed, and I don’t expect them to succeed at all,” Blockdaemon’s Ethereum lead told Cointelegraph. Blockdaemon’s Ethereum ecosystem lead Freddy Zwanzger believes Ethereum will retain its leadership position in the crypto ecosystem over the coming years due to its utility as a smart contract platform and upgrades to the network following the Merge.
Blockdaemon is an institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure platform that offers node operations and infrastructure tooling for blockchain projects.
Crypto projects that have been touted as Ethereum killers include Solana, Cardano, Tezos and Polkadot, among others. Many of these blockchains tout lower fees and faster transactions but have fewer active developers and certain blockchains place h less emphasis on decentralization.
To date, none have managed to displace Ethereum from its number two spot in terms of market cap. Cardano and Solana currently sit in the eighth and ninth positions, Polkadot is ranked 11 while Tezos is ranked 37, according to CoinMarketCap. Zwanzger believes that the upcoming Merge will further propel Ethereum onward and upward in terms of technology and price.
The Ethereum Merge involves transitioning it from the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) mining consensus to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model, and has been tentatively scheduled to be rolled out around September 19.
Currently, the proof-of-work consensus model allows the blockchain to process 15 to 20 transactions per second (TPS), according to data from Blockchair.
A quantum leap in the number of transactions per second is expected sometime in 2023 when the Ethereum network introduces sharding.
Sharding is a multi-phase upgrade to improve Ethereum’s scalability and capacity by splitting the entire network into multiple portions in order to increase the network capacity.
Sharding will work hand in hand with layer-2 solutions to further “supercharge” the scalability of the network.
Post-sharding, cofounder Vitalik Buterin has claimed the network will be capable of transaction speeds up to 100,000 TPS.
