Narratives rule absolutely everything in crypto because they are what control people’s attention and in the age of social media, he who controls the attention controls the universe. A big narrative that has persisted for many years now is around “Ethereum competitors” and how they are all going to kill Ethereum - and this narrative really took off in 2021. But fast forward to 2022 and these “alt-L1’s” have taken a backseat to Ethereum’s now-bustling layer 2 ecosystem - and for good reason.

Vance Spencer @pythianism

2021 narrative = Alt-L1s have solved blockchain scaling, ETH 2.0 is too little, too late 2022 narrative = Alt-L1s haven't been able to scale, most/all have structural issues, ETH 2.0 + rollups are the most viable to scale blockchains in the near term funny how things change

April 4th 2022

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I’ve always wondered what the mass-market appeal of an alt-L1 would be when fees to use the Ethereum network dropped to 0. I mean, all of these other chains like to advertise their main value prop as being “cheap fees” relative to Ethereum but now that Ethereum has a bustling layer 2 ecosystem where fees are getting cheaper all the time, the appeal of these alt-L1’s is trending towards 0. I mean, why settle for fast, cheap and insecure/centralized with alt-L1’s when you can have fast, cheap and secure/decentralized with Ethereum layer 2’s? The choice is a no-brainer to me - especially for developers.

Of course, people are also fans of these other chains because they buy into the native tokens which may appreciate in value causing people to have a sense of loyalty to an ecosystem. Though this same thing will happen with layer 2 projects once they tokenize so again, this isn’t something that alt-L1’s have a monopoly on, it’s just that they beat most of the layer 2’s to the punch with issuing a token. On top of this, there will be plenty of unique layer 2 native applications that will attract their own communities with their own loyalty which will bolster the layer 2 protocol’s own moat.

There are other things alt-L1 proponents will talk about when comparing their favorite chain to Ethereum such as an alt-L1’s consensus mechanism, its overall architecture, the aggressiveness of business development/marketing and many other things. Though I once again come back to what I said above - no ecosystem has a monopoly on any of these things - the “winners” are usually dictated by the effectiveness of building a long-lasting and loyal community - and money & marketing can only get you so far in that respect.

Obviously I believe that the Ethereum modular scaling roadmap is the best path forward to achieve global mass adoption while keeping the network decentralized, secure and sustainable. Many alt-L1 proponents disagree with this thesis - and that’s totally fine - but at the end of the day the technology will speak for itself over the long-run.

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.