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.
[0]: https://adapools.org
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.
0. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking
1. https://forum.cardano.org/t/a-guide-to-becoming-a-stake-pool...
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.
[0]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe0...
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.
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).
