Ethereum is not the only blockchain in town
When it comes to the number of addresses and transactions on the network, other blockchains are catching up to and surpassing Ethereum.
For developers though, Ethereum is the only blockchain in town
HOWEVER, you can see that other ecosystems like Solana are on a similar trajectory. They just haven't been around long enough to see the kind of adoption the Ethereum network is seeing.
Solana
Solana’s main selling points are that it is low-cost and fast. Transactions on the Solana network cost less than $0.01, far, far lower than some of the gas fees that those on the Ethereum network have to pay. Solana has block times of only 400 milliseconds, and as the hardware improves, so does the speed of the network.
Centralised?
However, this speed and these low transaction costs come at a price. Some argue that the Solana network is not decentralised enough. There are a few pieces of evidence that support this:
- In mid-2021, blockchain research firm Messari found that nearly 50% of Solana’s SOL tokens are held by venture capitalists, developers working on Solana and the Solana labs company itself
- The Ethereum network has more than 400,000 validators. The relevant number for Solana is 3400
- The main issue with centralisation is that it makes a blockchain easier to hack or bring down. The Solana network has been brought down multiple times, with one outage lasting over 17 hours
BNB Chain
Binance is one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world. Originally, they created their own blockchain called Binance Chain. Binance chain was “optimised for ultra-fast trading”. But in order to make it “ultra-fast”, Binance had to make a few trade-offs. One of these trade-offs was that Binance chain wasn’t as flexible (meaning it was more difficult to build on top of) compared to blockchains like Ethereum. That’s why Binance created the BNB Chain (formerly known as Binance Smart Chain).