Ethereum seems to have been struggling lately in terms of the growth we have seen on Bitcoin and other chains. This mainly comes down to what many are saying including myself is just sheer competition and options now happening.

In theory Ethereum should be able to take the options that competitors have that people are liking more and be able to integrate them into their own chain which would allow them to continue to innovate and take hold of things other chains are proving to be popular.

However that process seems slow and one of the biggest issues for Ethereum continues to be high fees that people just don't want to deal with. This should have kept Ethereum in front of the pack but instead it seems like it's starting to slide as other blockchains launch with the same features of Ethereum but are faster, cheaper and scalable. Places like BASE, Solana and a few others have seen record growth because of this while Ethereum's scaling solutions still seem to be roughly two years out. It's just too slow in this face paced world of Ethereum.

If I were Ethereum I'd work this year on a way to better, securely and faster roll out new features for the chain otherwise this slow crawl might end up being the end of Ethereum 5-10 years down the line. It wont be overnight that's for sure.

GitHub

Ah my days of being on QA and working with developers as the world GitHub haunts me once again. One of the important factor about chains like Ethereum is you can actully overview and see all of the things being worked on as potential additions to the chain.

However there's a key factor that many overlook. While it might look like there's still a lot of activity on Ethereum you need to strip out bug fixes from this mix. When you do that you start seeing a lot less new development happening on Ethereum while other chains are picking up on the new development. This is a shift that is in fact happening and again like I said it wont be instant and all at once but it's pretty clear that there's a slow shift away from Ethereum for the last year now.

The Difference

The big difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum right now is that Bitcoin remains to be more of a store of value with real limited use cases in terms of larger transactions.

Ethereum however ushered in smart contracts, NFTs and a lot of the core use cases we use today. However these are not exclusive to Ethereum which we are seeing with other chain popping up.

These systems while they say they are decentralized could have areas in which they are not resulting in server shut downs and not running in everyone's homes that could cause blackouts or downtime for the chain. This is where Bitcoin shines as a truly decentralized blockchain.

Now you could also look at blockchain and crypto as a web3 version. In which case you would look at the core of what made the web in terms of protocols. http, https, ftp, smtp etc.

Bitcoin has it's place and so does Ethereum in this case so there can be many protocols for the blockchain and crypto which get used as the core back ends.

Current Structure

Right now what we are seeing take shape for the blockchain and web 3 are many L1 or Layer 1 blockchains which then use bridges (wrapped tokens) in order to transfer between the blockchains.

The issue with that however is if anything happened to these bridges which are run on servers etc. you'd have a nearly full collapse of what it's currently used for and be back in what I would consider the stone age of crypto where there was only bitcoin.

The flip side of this is to have a core structure like bitcoin at the top which then filters into layer two's and then layer 3's etc in a top down type of format.

It's clear that advancments are still to come and get figured out. There's still a major lack in real wallet security and using it offline etc but I believe there will become a time in which that happens but it's most likely another 10 years or so of development down the road. There's still plenty to be done, invest and trade in that time frame so enjoy the ride, do your own research and invest how you want not what someone else tells you.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha