Why is there no "Ethereum killer"?

The Ethereum community has always insisted on developing on a cutting-edge and adventurous path. In fact, most of us agree with the sentiment that if a better platform came along, we would gladly jump to it. However, even if some new platform introduces the features that ETH 2.0 is trying to achieve (PoS, Sharding, etc...), there will be a clear silence in the community, unwillingness to migrate.

So why? Let's take a deeper look.

Us vs. Them

If you have been following the ETH community, you can probably guess a few possible reasons for this. One of them is how some platforms convey their wishes to the community or have already conveyed their wishes.

An example of this is Afri Schoeden pitting Polkadot against Ethereum — a core developer who “quit in anger” from Ethereum due to commotion in the community about Polkadot’s superiority over Ethereum.

0xScope: A certain address transferred 2 million SANDs to Binance, and a total of 8 million SANDs have been transferred in the past few days: On December 28, the monitoring data on the 0xScope chain showed that an address transferred 2 million SANDs (approx. $820,000) was transferred to Binance. It is reported that this SAND is part of the 10 million SAND received by the address 12 days ago. The address has transferred 8 million of the 10 million SAND to Binance, and there are still the last 2 million SAND in the address. .

During the same period, the price of SAND dropped from $0.58 to $0.41. [2022/12/28 22:12:50]

His departure would cause unrest within the community, which lamented their loss and sympathized with the reasons for Afri's departure. However, this situation will not last long.

Just two months after the incident, an unknown group launched Dothereum — a fork of Ethereum that is being built as a Parachain on Polkadot. And while the identity of the person who did the work has yet to be confirmed, many have traced it back to Afri.

OpenSea launches an on-chain royalty enforcement tool, and NFT sales will be limited to markets where royalties are mandatory: On November 6th, OpenSea announced in its official blog that it will soon launch an optional on-chain royalty enforcement tool for the new NFT series, aiming at Stand up for creators by empowering them and giving them the tools to control their own business models. The initial on-chain tool is a simple code snippet that creators can add to future NFT contracts as well as existing upgradable contracts. This code limits NFT sales to markets where royalties are enforced.

Starting at 0:00 on November 9th, OpenSea will only collect royalties for new NFT series that use the on-chain royalty execution tool. If the new series does not implement on-chain execution, no royalties will be collected. In the coming months OpenSea will roll out more tools to improve on-chain execution. Given the difficulty of enforcing on-chain mandatory royalty fees for existing NFT collections, OpenSea stated that no changes will be made to existing collections until at least December 8, 2022. [2022/11/6 12:21:47]

Naturally, the community that had previously sympathized with Afri's departure immediately turned around, seeing him as a traitor seeking to create division within the community. And such sentiment has undoubtedly changed the opinion of individuals in the community on the entire Polkadot project.

Sudoswap NFT transaction volume exceeded 100,000: Jinse Finance reported that according to Dune Analytics data, the NFT transaction volume of the Sudoswap platform has exceeded 100,000, which was 102,419 at the time of writing. US$ and fee income of US$ 116,105. [2022/8/23 12:43:13]

You'd think Polkadot would try to avoid such damage to its reputation after seeing what happened to EOS. Because EOS has actually branded itself as an "Ethereum killer".

How effective is this marketing approach for them? How many people migrated from Ethereum to EOS? Personally, I know of a few people who tried EOS, but didn't have any network effects, and the people who stayed were mainly to make quick money from Block One.

Ma Zhitao of Weizhong Bank: Actively promote the application of blockchain in industrial digitization: news on December 15, a few days ago, at the 2021 Golden Chain Alliance Membership Conference and Ecological Conference, WeBank Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Golden Chain Alliance Technology Ma Zhitao, chairman of the committee, said that WeBank will continue to promote the Golden Chain Alliance to give full play to the advantages of innovative technologies such as blockchain and privacy computing, deepen the co-creation of open source ecology, and gather the power of the ecology to promote the high-quality development of industrial digitalization. (China Securities Network) [2021/12/15 7:40:17]

Of course, EOS has also received a lot of attention from the Ethereum community to satirize it. From this incident, the Ethereum community began to really hate EOS and celebrate its frequent failures. If this were purely technical, the Ethereum community would actively mock other Delegated Proof-of-Stake platforms, but this is not the case - EOS waged a war on Ethereum, and the community united against the attackers.

Other, etc.

The matter did not end there. Every month new platforms launch and position themselves against Ethereum - asking developers to move to their platform instead of working with developers and letting them make their own choices.

WTI crude oil futures fell by 2.00% in the day: WTI crude oil futures fell by 2.00% in the day and are now at $70.91 per barrel. [2021/12/10 7:29:43]

Now, you might be thinking, "there are millions of developers in the world, why does he keep focusing on the importance of these platforms taking developers away from the Ethereum community? Can't they bring new people into the space?"

In fact, it is not the case, the reason is very simple.

This sentence has been circulating in the community for a long time, and it is considered to be something that brings blockchain technology into the public eye and at the same time breeds a wave of newcomers into this field. It was Ethereum's "killer DApp" when initial coin offerings (ICOs) started to really take off in 2017.

While others have raised funds this way before, it has become standardized on Ethereum and is easier to implement. Add to that the fact that people have raised tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in mere seconds (with no accountability whatsoever!), and you can now see why many people are looking at Ethereum.

However, as the hype died down, we saw a massive exodus of people within the community. But quite a few stayed on and made greater contributions to the overall community around the platform.

So, while some other platforms may be technically superior, they don't offer such a unique value proposition yet. And with increased regulation, they are less likely to offer the masses as high-profile projects as ICOs.

It is also for this reason that it is necessary for these new platforms to focus on the Ethereum community. Because until they can provide value to the masses and catch the eye for the next "killer DApp", those interested in building on their technology will be limited to the existing developer pool (mostly on Ethereum Construct).

Practical

Developers considering building on a new platform must also weigh the platform's benefits to the existing Ethereum ecosystem and community. And when you're already working on a new module, you want all the help you can get.

Existing Infrastructure

Ethereum has a large amount of existing infrastructure that would be discarded if the developers were to migrate. Veil is a good example, due to the lack of required toolkits, it is impossible to build a peer-to-peer prediction market based on the open protocols of 0x and Augur (both on Ethereum) on any other platform.

Battle-Tested

In theory, Ethereum may be technically inferior to these other platforms, but it has been live for nearly four years and has been tweaked in that time, addressing the numerous bugs and inefficiencies of the system running in production. And these other platforms don't have the same influence as Ethereum at present.

Evanescent network effects

All that said, network effects can only last so long. There is a lot of frustration due to the limitations of the Ethereum platform, and developers are sure to seek greener pastures as alternatives become more viable. The question is whether Ethereum's scalability roadmap addresses these concerns before they do.

The answer is "yes", but I don't think ETH 2.0 will bring this kind of scalability because it will take too long to achieve and is highly experimental. So, at the same time, we have layer 2 solutions working to provide greater scalability to the mainnet, with popular scaling schemes like Plasma and state channels. And those are great solutions, but what if we could combine the roadmap of layer one with the speed and agility of layer two development?

I came up with this idea a while ago, and it's great to see that's exactly what SKALE's "elastic sidechains" offer developers in the Ethereum ecosystem. Each Elastic Sidechain is equivalent to a shard in ETH 2.0, with the Ethereum mainnet serving as the beacon chain (assuming finalized in ETH 1.X). And each Elastic Sidechain supports threshold signatures, which enable inter-chain communication (cross-shard communication) in the manner proposed by the ETH 2.0 specification.

And they're not the only ones! There are many, many teams studying various styles of Plasma (Plasma Group, Loom, etc...), state channels (Connext, Celer, Counterfactual, etc...) There are many, many teams studying Plasma (Plasma Group, Loom, etc...), State Channels (Connext, Celer, Counterfactual, etc...) and other scaling solutions, their work will greatly improve the usability of Ethereum, This enables it to continue to attract more businesses and individuals as the smart contract platform of choice.

With these other smart contract platforms popping up, I see no threat to Ethereum. While they are technically more advanced than Ethereum, they often pit themselves against the Ethereum community (preventing existing developers from adopting their technology), and often market their technology to people outside the existing blockchain community rather than their value (preventing further public adoption). The latter point is often due to their inability to provide any novel value to what they are marketing to, aka no "killer DApp".

Add to that Ethereum's battle-tested network, thriving ecosystem and community, and ability to scale through second-layer technologies, and the reason to migrate to other platforms quickly disappears. That's not to say it's impossible for any one platform to replace Ethereum, I just think it's very, very unlikely.

Eric Olszewski Author

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Editor Li Hanbo

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