Ethereum Enhancers or Ethereum Killers (A New Ecosystem)

The Pump! The Dump!

It's 2021 and the crypto pump is at its heads. From low patronage from June 2020, the price of Bitcoin surged to an all-time high in late December 2020 pulling up the cryptocurrency spaces along with it. The frenzy, in the bull market, is at an all-time high. Mainstream media picked up on the news, countries pulling up their regulations on cryptocurrency and reassessing their interest. Entrepreneurs such as Tesla’s Elon Musk have played a great role in a space that has been battling its own ability to be seen and have been hoping to be listed among the listings of the major payment/trading platforms and exchanges. This great Mecca that the cryptocurrency space has reached has made people delve in further. From questions such as “What is Blockchain?” to “What is Cryptocurrency?” to “What is Bitcoin?” and “ Will Bitcoin take over the world?”, has been a daily query that Google and other search engines have had to answer. The rest of the world has emerged to hear of a technology that has been in their faces for almost 10 years and yet have never considered it one worthy of consideration. Institutions all across the world have been forced after the pandemic to go for new options and re-evaluate their portfolio. From your Grandmother asking the question of what is Bitcoin, I am sure a renewed interest has emerged in the Blockchain space. Bitcoin and its brothers' altcoins have made 2021 a cryptocurrency year, a trend that is still to continue for the rest of the year.

Minting of Projects

Projects have also seen a renewed boost. Wouldn’t you? In a year where doing any other is really a dumb idea. The acceleration of Blockchain Projects and Technologies has received a renewed boosts. Developers are scrambling to catch up with the revolutions. Solidity developers are increasing as employers are rushing to recruit blockchain developers into their teams. Smart Contract Designers and Contract Designers as a whole are being sorted for. There goes another time of the year like 2017 where the term blockchain is the time to increase our money bags, achieve our dream project, or literally, or for the unfortunate ones, get scammed. Blockchain development is being added to the daily routine of the established company sometimes even unnecessarily since there is no problem to be solved in the current use-cases and business models of these companies. The truth is a decentralized system is better than a centralized system any day, anytime. At least for now-not necessarily if you don’t want to be tortured by the word -Gas Fees!

The Ethereum Miracle and Survival

One major platform that has dominated the space of the Blockchain space from the initial launch of the first use-case Bitcoin has been Ethereum. Ethereum provided a new way of managing financial transactions by creating a self-validating language known as Solidity which brought into reality Nick Szabo's idea of a Smart Contract. This ensured that companies could build complex protocols that could simulate business models and design rules that could work with their various industrial use-cases. Ethereum was built as a “Computer of The World”. A network of thousands of companies, that act as a single computer and act as a single entity to manage transactions and reach consensus through a group of validators incentivized in a process normally knows as “Mining”. This was a real game-changer. The idea was held by the best programmers in the world, building tools (although buggy like Truffle in its initial forms ) to overcome its handicap. The opensource was a sheer degree of love as the blockchain space portrayed what the word “Open-Source’” meant, working together to make sure their dream of a distributed complex transparent system became a reality. From the emergence of Bitcoin, playing a part of a peer-to-peer payment mechanism, the space spearheaded by Ethereum had emerged to an industrial case technology that satisfied all enterprises of all types.

Ethereum On Steroids

However, trying to satisfy everyone is just a case of technology on steroids. It is like the internet (Web 2.0) which was just initially made for sending text-based information among simple and humble professors now trying to become a global television, sending videos and music. Although not a story of how the internet was saved from Flash through HTML 5, Ethereum has been a victim of this as well. Being the first Blockchain-based network to provide a set of tools to satisfy industrial use-cases, there has been a lot of pressure for Ethereum to become that one perfect Blockchain-based network as chanted by the millions of Ethereum Maximalists out there. Ethereum has faired well by responding to almost the impossible, making it the most advanced Blockchain network currently.

The Blockchain Everest

However, it faces its biggest challenge which is still yet to be overcome. It is the mountain that nobody seems to climb. The Blockchain’s curse-The issue of Scalability. Apart from slowness in Blockchain-based platforms due to the slowness in reaching a consensus, scalability remains a great challenge. This problem produced a lot of innovations that aimed to capitalize on this handicap and become the next Ethereum. Companies such as TRON, EOS, Komodo, and Qtum emerged with alternative consensus mechanisms and changes in the underlying network, with the main aim of increasing transactions and becoming more effective and ensure scalability. However, due to the network effect and the advanced complexity edge Ethereum had over the others, most developers eventually stayed with Ethereum since re-inventing wheels can sometimes be hard, and using an untested weapon is not a good thing for a David and Goliath Battle. With time Ethereum became the most dominant Blockchain network apart from Bitcoin with all Defi and DeGov developers building their projects on its “Unscalable Platform”

The Promise of Eth 2.0

To Ethereum, the dream of scalability is linked to their story and their survival. After much rescheduling and postponement, several times Eth 2.0 finally made its way at phase 0 December 2020. Vitalik Buterin released a Roadmap on Twitter outlining the dream to achieve scalability and enable the cost of transactions to be cheaper and provide additional features. From the long-promised dreamland, Ethereum managed to launch Phase 0 of Eth 2.0 in late December, a dream come true for most skeptics.

When The Gas Burns

However this is a long way off and except for Defi projects crying out the “ Save Us From The Gas Fees”, chant, many companies such as Binance have pulled out their own tricks, leveraging some of the network effects of Ethereum into their own prosperity. Ethereum has responded to this pressure by creating and launching another project to optimize on top of its Layer 1 platform in order to reduce the Gas Fee for these hurting traders. The dream is to reduce the whales and return the game back to the shrimps. After all the shrimps have trusted Ethereum up to this time and there is no need to neglect them at this point. The plan is to get to Eth 2.0 in one piece and for that to happen there is the need to come up with an alternative solution that will ensure that their customers do not curse them in their dreams.

Each Man For Himself, Ethereum For Us All

The first alternative from the set of many alternatives was the need for a Layer 2 protocol. A game of each man, sorry company for himself. Companies such as Aragon, Synthetix, Loopring, Immutable have already launched their Layer 2 protocol and many more are expected to cast the net in this deep water. As proposed by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, there is the need for a Layer 2 solution to provide a good cushion and alternative in the chase for scalability. Layer 2 solutions sort of provides the needed framework that works with blockchain systems to solve the issues of transaction speed and scale that are currently blocking the growth of major cryptocurrency networks. Although Layer 2 protocols are normally seen as secondary, they form a fundamental part of existing networks. For instance, the Bitcoin Lighting Network and the Ethereum Plasma protocol work to provide a good system for both networks. Other alternative improvements that have been reached in the Ethereum War are innovations such as State Channels and even Layer 1 solutions. With regards to this, several others have been proposed in its attempt to fix this issue from consensus protocol changes and sharding. Currently, Ethereum is investing its hope in its new solutions known as Rollups. This provides optimism as it sets the Roadmap to Ethereum 2.0- The Ethereum and Blockchain GloryLand.

The Big Builders

However other projects are not resting. Surprisingly two of the contenders are both former co-founders of Ethereum, a status that makes most skeptics stop to listen. Gavin Wood, developer of Solidity, and author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper and yeah, you guessed right, founder of Polkadot. Charles Hoskinson also a former co-founder and CEO of InputOutputHongKong (IOHK) also left Ethereum to build Cardano. If you have never read the story of Julius Ceasar, Crassus, and Pompey and what it means not to cross the Rubicon River, well you have the 21st Century Version of it, you might as well pick your pen and paper for this one. Although many are against the idea of that perfect blockchain that solves all problems, the narrative has now changed, the survival of Ethereum is pegged to the survival of many blockchain-based projects and survival cryptocurrencies or altcoins. This is why several blockchain projects from Polkadot to Cardano to Avalanche each present their own pitch of becoming the Ethereum alternative or Ethereum Bridge. Several tools are being built and blockchain-based projects are rising which is intended to bridge the gaps between them in the foreseeable future. The Ethereum Killer narrative has now changed. Fighting against over 200 billion USD of market cap is no joke and the intelligent masters of these projects know that. Now the best plan is for all these parties to coexist and present a better blockchain revolution as they focus on the best their blockchain projects provide in their own blockchain story and narrative. The truth is we await a future where all blockchains become transactable, easy to use, affordable, scalable, and interoperable at the same time, among several existing unitary ecosystems, and although this industry remains young, whoever solves this puzzle is the card the future is going to put its bet on.