While Ethereum has consolidated its leadership in the crypto sphere, thanks to its network effect and one of the largest communities in the crypto landscape, new competitors are appearing on the horizon undermining the primacy and trying to grab a slice of the market worth almost $2 Trillion.
Today there are over 100 different Layer-1 blockchains competing against each other and although at least 50% of the total market capital is firmly in the hands of BTC and ETH, new entrants are mainly focused on mitigating the weaknesses of Ethereum: Smart Contract, scalability, transaction costs.
In Ethereum, transactions require “gas” paid in Eth, the more effort required to calculate the EVM, the more gas you need, the more ETH you have to pay for the transaction.
Although it is a candidate to compete with the world of finance, thanks to DeFi and all the crypto financial products that have been able to create a new vision and an economic paradigm, ethereum continues to be slow and the 20 transactions per second are still not enough to promote it as an antagonist tool to Visa or Mastercard or just compared to some other cryptos.
Currently, transactions in ETH have an average confirmation time of 5 minutes, but as soon as Ethereum 2.0 arrives, you can have up to 24,000 transactions/s, thanks to sharding that will break the chain into smaller “fragments”.
Ethereum 2.0 will be backed by a new consensus algorithm, Proof-Of-Stake, probably the best solution for cryptocurrencies to “scale”, in fact this will result in the elimination of miners and the loss of the entire “industry” that supports/justifies the value of the currency. Like gold, Bitcoin and Ethereum are expensive, to some extent, precisely because they are difficult to obtain.
Best Link: https://medium.com/token-terminal/l1-series-overview-of-ethereum-2-0-d5e8c758d79d
Ethereum is only programmed in Solidity, a highly specialized language that not many companies and institutions are familiar with, however solidity has definitely been revolutionary, it has proven that the blockchain can store much more than monetary transfers.
However, its semantics have issues that reflect the fact that the state of contracts is stored (persistently) in the blockchain (storage), allowing for the definition of dangerous and vulnerable SCs, the cause of its re-entrancy problem, which led to the infamous 2016 DAO attack for example, draining $50 million from an Ethereum smart contract.
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