Yes, ETH 2.0 is coming in 2022 (unless it gets delayed). There's one proposal for July that might help a little and more transactions are moving to L2 chains (LRC, Matic) where you pay the high fees only on exit/entering the L2 but can do transactions there for cheap.
Outside of ETH, BSC (Binance's smart chain, the exchange with 9x Coinbase's volume) already has lower fees but the chain is controlled by binance (its 'stock' is the token BNB valued at 40b currently, possibly a good investment) and has an influx of projects due to low fees and easy ETH-BSC migration. There are some other competitors with active smart chains but less projects and many are waiting on ADA's smart chain in early Q2 as well as on some other competitors that (might) solve that and other problems.
ADA (built by an ETH co-founder) specifically solves some of smart contract's current gripes by allowing you to build them in functional languages like Haskell, while being the most decentralized option which might be of interest here.
While I don't deny and made sure to include the 'unless it gets delayed' part, they are much further along now.
The majority of ETH 2 is live and more and more ETH is locked to it (~12% right now) so the current 2022 estimate is a bit more realistic than past ones (though, of course it can keep being delayed).
To be clear, ADA doesn't have a smart contract platform yet. I believe that's part of the update that is coming in a couple of days. They've been building towards that for several years and have done a lot of great work in the space.
Tezos is quite a bit ahead of ADA in that particular respect as they have smart contracts already.
I don't believe ETH2 will ever show up, but who knows.
Full disclosure, I've got holdings in both ADA and XTZ.
Well, if Ethereum 2.0 "never shows up", that's $5.3B locked in a contract[0] that "will never do anything". I think $5.3B is sufficient motivation to get it released.
That's the same as claiming that the "market cap" of a cryptocurrency has some meaning. It really doesn't.
Both of those statements assume that somehow every ETH coin ever minted can be sold for the asking price right now. That's an obviously laughable assumption.
>To be clear, ADA doesn't have a smart contract platform yet.
Yes, as I said it is planned to come in early Q2. What comes tomorrow is a necessary step in that direction - the introduction of tokens on the ADA network. For what is worth, I see little reason to doubt that their smart launch will go well - I used their playground and looked at the activity in the testnet and it all seems to be going as planned.
The bigger question is whether enough projects will move/launch there.
For those who don't know, the founder of IOHK (which created ADA) is one of the co-founders of ETH.
I'm confident in his ethics and his ability. I'm not so confident in the ethics of the ETH project anymore.
-edited above since I get rate limited every time I post more than two posts in a day, read the following as a response to the post calling me a liar below:
Ok, I edited to take out the reference to when he left since apparently I made a mistake on the dates -- I thought he was still in the ETH foundation when that happened.
However, he was one of the few voices calling for the ETH foundation not to hard fork to just roll back the DAO hack. The ETH foundation did what was expedient for them financially, and ignored the core tenet of cryptocurrency.
Fact remains, ETH was an immature cryptocurrency, run by immature people, who made immature mistakes. He was one of the few who called them out over it.
You can see what he has done over the years since with IOHK to bring maturity to the space. I think the results with ADA speak for themselves.
This is absolutely untrue. Charles Hoskinson left the Ethereum Foundation in June 2014. The DAO hack occurred in June 2016.
He left because he wanted the Ethereum Foundation to be a for-profit while the rest of founders were looking to make it a non-profit foundation. This is by his own account, the other side of the story doesn't look as good for him but I have no idea what happened so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
So I've been hearing this "being the most decentralized option" about Cardano in less reputable sources (aka YouTube comments) than HN. Can you expand on that? From what I'm seeing, Cardano has 1 912 pools[0] that can produce blocks, which is less than 11 586 on Ethereum[1] and much less than 100 000 validators on Ethereum 2.0[2]. Sure, many validators are controlled by same people, but there's a much easier barrier to entry for new validators.
Okay, admittedly it's not quite there yet but by the end of march 100% of blocks will be produced by independent stake pool operators. The number of current pools is somewhat misleading - switching between them is frictionless, more will keep being added, and there are rules in place so they can't grow too much (staking rewards decrease quickly) and the average # of ADA per wallet is dropping (<100k/wallet average now).
I should've really said the most decentralized alternative option but even in terms of biggest holders ETH is more top heavy (many controlled by the same people as you said).
> but there's a much easier barrier to entry for new validators.
Is it? The minimum to run a validator is 32 ETH[0] while there isn't even a minimum for ADA. 4 GB of RAM and 1 GB bandwidth[1] (for ADA) isn't much of a deterrent either.
> there are rules in place so they can't grow too much (staking rewards decrease quickly)
I think this refers to the k factor, that puts the "soft limit" on decentralization. This I see as a barrier to entry: Ethereum 2.0 is 32ETH and that's it. Cardano has no monetary fee, but has eventual competition between pools, which is variable, likely ongoing cost. Barrier to entry is less defined, and could at some point grow beyond dollar value of 32 ETH (to become a competitive pool). Whereas Ethereum 2.0 will always stay a constant 32 ETH, no matter how many validators exist.
There might be competition between pools but also costs for them to grow beyond a point which benefits decentralization - the issue at hand.
What does it matter here if they have a harder time when none of them are incentivized to even grow to 1%? Even if they do grow, there's plenty of incentive for stakers to move to new ones on the spot. This might mean that e.g. pools will increase their costs due to the risk and stakers will earn a bit less but they still won't grow beyond a point.
Tomochain should be considered as an alternative to BSC. Its a pos network, evm compatible, 2000 tps and 100 times cheaper than eth. You can also issue gasless tokens for your own project on the chain.
Price wise we are not far from price discovery. Its really flying under the radar.
Outside of ETH, BSC (Binance's smart chain, the exchange with 9x Coinbase's volume) already has lower fees but the chain is controlled by binance (its 'stock' is the token BNB valued at 40b currently, possibly a good investment) and has an influx of projects due to low fees and easy ETH-BSC migration. There are some other competitors with active smart chains but less projects and many are waiting on ADA's smart chain in early Q2 as well as on some other competitors that (might) solve that and other problems.
ADA (built by an ETH co-founder) specifically solves some of smart contract's current gripes by allowing you to build them in functional languages like Haskell, while being the most decentralized option which might be of interest here.
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