Freddy Zwanzager, Head of ETH Ecosystem at Blockdamon, believes that Ethereum will maintain its leadership position in the crypto ecosystem in the coming years due to its utility as a smart contract platform and upgrades to the network after the merger.
Speaking to Cointelegraph during the Ethereum Community Conference (ethCC) this week, Zwanzager said:
“It will continue to be a leader. I mean, obviously, smart contract platforms first and foremost, and that is not going to change.”
Blockdaemon is an institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure platform that provides node operations and infrastructure tooling for blockchain projects.
Blockdaemon employees also targeted so-called “Ethereum killers” – competing Layer 1 blockchains – who tried to topple Ethereum from their leadership position, but failed.
“Not all Ethereum killers of the day were successful, and I don’t expect them to succeed at all.”
Crypto projects that are known as “Ethereum killers” include Solana, Cardano, Tezos and Polkadot. Many of these blockchains offer lower fees and faster transactions, but have fewer active developers and some blockchains place less emphasis on decentralization.
To date, no one has managed to displace Ethereum from second place in terms of market cap. According to Coinmarketcap, Cardano and Solana are currently ranked 8th and 9th, Polkadot is ranked 11th while Tezos is at 37th.
Zwanzager believes that the upcoming merge will take Ethereum further and upward in terms of technology and price.
“There’s a lot of cool stuff out there, like eco-friendliness, [and] All kinds of things that are beneficial to a lot of people. Staking will become more attractive,” he said.
“It is a show of strength and commitment that the roadmap is coming true.”
The Ethereum merge involves converting it from energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) mining consensus to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model, and is scheduled to launch around September 19th.
However, Zwanzager acknowledged that the big future challenge for Ethereum will remain scalability.
“The original Ethereum roadmap was focused on sharding, but that is no longer the case. We now have a roll-up-focused roadmap, so let’s go scaling through layer 2 solutions.”
Currently, the “proof-of-work” consensus model allows blockchains to process between 15 and 20 transactions per second (TPS), according to blockchain data.
A quantum jump in the number of transactions per second is expected sometime in 2023 when the Ethereum network introduces sharding.
The sharing network is a multi-stage upgrade to improve the scalability and capacity of Ethereum by splitting the entire network into multiple parts to increase capacity.
The sharing will work hand in hand with Layer 2 solutions to “supercharge” the scalability of the network.
Following the sharding, cofounder Vitalik Buterin has claimed that the network will be able to perform transactions at speeds of up to 100,000 TPS.
