Ethereum firmly ranks second in the currency circle: What is its real advantage?

Vitalik 2025-11-3 11:40 63197人围观 ETH

Facing strong challenges from rising stars such as Solana and Cardano, Ethereum is still at a disadvantage in terms of transaction speed and fees. However, with its deep developer community, strong network effects and continuous technological upgrades, it still ranks second among cryptocurrencies.

As the cryptocurrency with the market capitalization second only to Bitcoin, Ethereum is currently facing unprecedented competitive pressure. Data shows that Ethereum’s market share has dropped to around 15%, while competing chains such as Solana attract large numbers of users with speeds of more than 50,000 transactions per second and almost negligible fees.

With performance indicators clearly lagging behind, what exactly supports Ethereum’s solid position? Will this support be broken in the future? How will Ethereum break the situation?

01 Performance disadvantage: an indisputable fact

Currently, the competitive landscape of public chains is becoming increasingly clear, and Ethereum clearly lags behind its main competitors in basic performance indicators.

In terms of transaction speed, the Ethereum mainnet can only handle 15-30 TPS, while Solana’s figure exceeds 65,000, and even Cardano can reach 250 TPS.

From the perspective of transaction costs, the gap is even more obvious. The average fee for a transaction on the Ethereum network is about $0.05, while Solana only costs $0.00025, a difference of nearly 200 times.

Such performance differences directly affect user experience and platform selection. When developers build high-frequency applications, such as games, payments and micro-reward platforms, they are increasingly inclined to choose higher-performance chains such as Solana.

02 Deep advantage: invisible moat

Although it does not have an advantage in surface performance, Ethereum has established a series of deep competitive advantages that are difficult to shake.

Ethereum has the largest developer community in cryptocurrency. This ecosystem is not only broad, but also has accumulated various infrastructure and tools built over several years, forming a powerful network effect.

Industry insiders compare Ethereum to a well-established city with a sound legal system, road network and public services, while other emerging chains are like newly planned new cities. Although the roads are wide, supporting facilities are still under construction.

Institutional investors’ confidence in Ethereum remains firm. There are companies holding approximately 70,140 Ethereum, worth over $321 million. At the same time, the Ethereum ETF experienced over $1 billion in inflows, showing traditional financial markets’ recognition of its long-term value.

Ethereum’s strengths lie in its decentralization, security, and developer ecosystem, rather than purely in pursuit of performance metrics. This design philosophy makes Ethereum far superior to many emerging public chains in terms of security and attack resistance.

03 Future support: Will it collapse?

In the face of increasingly fierce competition, whether the support of Ethereum will be broken has become a matter of widespread concern in the industry.

In the short term, Ethereum’s moat remains strong. Institutional support creates a positive feedback loop: as more entities adopt Ethereum, liquidity improves and price stability increases, attracting further adoption.

However, in the medium and long term, the market structure is quietly changing. The industry generally believes that this year may become a critical year for competition in the blockchain industry. Market competition between different virtual machines may bring new opportunities to investors, and some emerging public chains may even surpass the market value of Ethereum at some point in time.

The loyalty of the developer community will also be a key factor. Although competitors offer superior technical indicators, Ethereum's deep developer culture and broad user base keep it ahead in application innovation.

04 Technological evolution: Ethereum’s response

Recognizing its own performance shortcomings, Ethereum did not sit still and wait for failure. Instead, it improved its mainnet capabilities through a series of technical upgrades.

Ethereum developers have officially set a target date of December 3rd for the Fusaka upgrade. This important upgrade will implement approximately a dozen Ethereum improvement proposals aimed at improving the sustainability, security, and scalability of the base chain and surrounding second-layer ecosystem.

The core highlight of Fusaka’s upgrade is PeerDAS technology, which provides validators with a more efficient way to access data. With data availability sampling, each node no longer needs to store all blob data, but only needs to be responsible for a part of it, which can theoretically achieve up to 8 times scalability.

The Fusaka upgrade will also increase Ethereum’s block gas limit from 30 million units to 150 million units and is expected to quickly double blob capacity. This change will significantly improve network throughput and provide greater room for Layer 2 solutions.

Faced with mainnet performance limitations, Ethereum is actively developing Layer 2 expansion plans. Mainstream Layer 2 platforms such as Starknet, Optimism, Base and Arbitrum each have their own characteristics. These expansion solutions can handle thousands of transactions per second, far exceeding the 15-30 TPS of Ethereum Layer 1, and are securely empowered through the main network.

05 Multi-chain future: Ethereum’s positioning

In the wave of public chain competition, Ethereum is repositioning its role.

The Ethereum ecosystem has achieved leaps and bounds, and Layer 2 expansion solutions have become the core driving force for network fee reduction and congestion relief. These solutions can handle thousands of transactions per second, far exceeding Ethereum Layer 1’s 15-30 TPS.

Ultimately, there is no single winner - each L2 is carving out its own niche. The future of Ethereum will be multi-chain, modular, and powered by zk.

The Ethereum ecosystem continues to follow the path of modularization and fragmentation, and remains confident in infrastructure construction and technological innovation. Ethereum will work hard to solidify its position as the world's computer and Web3 financial settlement layer.

The development trajectory of the blockchain industry is strikingly similar to the early days of the Internet. Just as the Internet era has evolved from portals to social platforms to mobile applications, the competition in public chains is far from over.

The future is likely to be a world where multiple chains coexist and are connected to each other, with each chain optimized for different needs. Ethereum, with its first-mover advantage, strong community and continuous technological evolution, is likely to continue to play the role of the basic layer in this diversified ecosystem, just like the TCP/IP protocol in the Internet, although it is inconspicuous, it is crucial.