Solana and Polygon – overpowered their light on Ethereum after surging 12,000% in the previous year as the faster and cheaper coins and the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, have stolen headlines this year.
The party just started with the fast-growing networks and a spate of rivals poised to take advantage. People should be seeing even bigger gains as they revolutionize to draw a growing base of investors enamored with digital currencies.
Rosh Singh is the founder of crypto trading start-up Quadency. He said that Ethereum needs to do something quickly as others with faster and more innovative consensus and mechanisms are gathering lots of funding from VCs
He notes, however, that Ethereum’s 2.0 upgrade, if executed on time by early 2022, should enhance its attractiveness.
Avalanche, Fantom, and Terra Cryptocurrencies
Singh expect Ethereum alternatives. Avalanche, Fantom, and Terra will deliver powerful gains. Their networks bring pioneering ways to solve problems with proof-of-stake (POS) consensus and stable coins.
Avalanche’s magic stems from an innovative technology called “directed acyclic graphs” (DAGs). For a transaction to be confirmed, 80% of a DAG’s nodes must validate it. It eliminates the probability that one dominant node or miner, as can happen in POS blockchains, will control the process.
This form of market manipulation is referred to as miner extractable value (MEV). It caused losses for decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) investors.
Fantom, meanwhile, uses a similar mechanism called Lachesis but has a smaller circulation supply. This should help sustain its FTM token’s future price, analysts say. Built for decentralized applications (dapps), transactions occur in less than 2 seconds. This compares to a reported 5 minutes and as high as four hours for Ethereum.
Up 14,380% in the past year, Singh says, “Fantom could gain another four to five times soon.”
He also likes Terra. It is doing a respectable job of solving the current stable coin dilemma of proving a network’s 1-to-1 crypto-fiat reserves.
He explained that they have Tether, USDT, Dai, and many other stable coins out there. However, most of them still rely on some form of formal funds verification. Terra (LUNA coin) is solving this by using other verification methods.
Asked for views on other Ethereum-killers like Cardano, the number six coin in the $2.7 trillion cryptocurrency market, Singh says he is not an enthusiastic fan. He added that hey had a huge amount of funding and time to catch up with Ethereum. When they finally launched smart contracts, they were full of bugs and issues that continue to linger till this day.
Smart Contracts $12 Billion in Value
Solana too has experienced glitches, recently crashing for 14 hours as its protocol. This boasts it can process 50,000 transactions per second compared to fifteen or less for Ethereum – was maxed out, showing that faster speeds are useless without network reliability.
Matthew Sigel, who manages the cryptocurrency research at VanEck, agrees Fantom will do well. The firm belongs to its fledging MVIS list featuring thirteen of the world’s top smart contract protocols seen returning $12 billion for investors in 12 months. The club also includes Avalanche, Solana, Cardano and Polka dot as its top five holdings.
These and other Ethereum alternatives are rushing to execute smart contracts – blockchain-coded agreements that execute (often by issuing a payment) once pre-determined conditions are met – better and faster than rivals as they scramble to lead the crypto race.
But Sigel said that the metaverse or fast-growing virtual universe users all are part of now – could provide more excitement in coming months.”
A handful of protocols have risen in recent week. The Sandbox, in particular, which sells metaverse properties and islands through NFTs.
Up 1,663% since last November, The Sandbox has grown rapidly. It drew 12,000 unique virtual landowners including rapper Snoop Dogg and the Walking Dead show, where players can use avatars of their favorite characters to play a game.
It also earned $93 million in a Softbank-led capital insertion last week to develop its properties beyond gaming and into virtual concerts, fashion, and architecture.
