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...
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.
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.
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).
