Ethereum Gas Fees Are Falling. Why Bother Investing In Ethereum Alternatives?
The king of all blockchains – Ethereum (ETH) – was once slow and costly. It led to the quick development of rival blockchains. But now Ethereum has corrected much of its problems, developed its own layer 2 chain like Optimism, is improving the capabilities of its layer 1 chain, and its gas fees have fallen from a June 2020 high of around 709 Gwei (the price in blockchain lingo) to 5.08 Gwei as of May 29. Gas fees have fallen 67% from this time last year, reducing prices for complex smart contracts hundreds of dollars. Why bother investing in an alt-chain now?
“The predicted developer exodus from Ethereum never materialized,” said Alex Loktev, Chief Commercial Officer at P2P.org, a blockchain infrastructure company that provides staking services primarily for institutional clients.
Ethereum consistently supports over 6,000 monthly active developers, dwarfing the combined developer activity of layer 1 chain rivals Solana (~3,200) and Avalanche (~406). Monthly active developers numbers reflect the number of software engineers that are building applications on a particular blockchain, opposed to monthly active users, which measures things like active wallets, or trading and gaming on the blockchain. “Ethereum’s has a deep bench of talent and they are not chasing transient yield farms,” Loktev said. “They are focused on building scalable infrastructure with real-world use cases.”
Loktev said Ethereum still offers “unmatched benefits” for users. He named a unified security model and integrated …
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