Ethereum is probably the better-known crypto in the smart contracts space. But its market leadership is not guaranteed, as it continues to struggle with a never-ending scalability problem. Already some major projects are shying away from Ethereum. A good example is the Guardian circle, which has announced that it was in favor of launching its crypto token on the NEO platform, as opposed to Ethereum. You are probably thinking, that’s not a big deal, applications are launching on NEO all the time. Well, this one is quite different!
First of all, Guardian Circle is not your everyday application that has no much intrinsic value. This is a project that has the potential to disrupt the 911 system as you know it today, not just in the U.S, but all across the world. Therefore, when its team makes it clear that it has some fundamental reasons to choose one smart contract platform over the other, the market is bound to take note.
What’s even more interesting is the reasons they have given for their choice of NEO over Ethereum.One of the reasons is that of transaction costs. According to the Guardian Circle team, the fact that NEO Gas is separate from NEO means that transaction costs for running an application on the NEO platform are way lower, than doing the same on the Ethereum platform. They have also advanced the argument that NEO smart contracts can be written in Python, a programming language that is known by many developers all across the world. That’s quite different from Ethereum’s Solidity, which is yet to gain a wide user base in the developer world. The result is that it is much faster to work on a project as large as Guardian Circle on NEO, than on Ethereum since the project managers can loop in a wider number of developers.
Away from the issue of NEO and Guardian circle, there is also the fact the smart contracts space has seen a rise of newer and better platforms that outperform Ethereum on multiple parameters. Take Lisk (LSK) for example. It makes use of sidechains that allows developer to create their own blockchains, hence eliminate congestion on the main blockchain. The Lisk sidechains are designed in such a way that, if there is a bug on one of them, it doesn’t not affect the entire network. This is quite revolutionary and is guaranteed to further reduce the importance of Ethereum on the smart contracts space.
It’s also important to note that the problem is not competition per se, the problem is that there are no major announcements so far, on how to solve Ethereum’s scalability and transaction cost issues.If Ethereum were to make some keynote announcements, you can expect the tide to change. Prove to this is the recent upsurge of bitcoin after it made some announcements about the lightning network, that’s guaranteed to drastically increase bitcoin transaction speeds.
Unless similar announcements are made, I am afraid Ethereum could fall back in importance in the Smart contracts space. That would kill its hopes of flippenning, among many other opportunities in the market.
