Analysis of the Public Blockchain Competition Landscape

In recent months, the cryptocurrency market has been filled with hot topics, with projects occasionally skyrocketing by tenfold or a hundredfold, leaving even seasoned insiders overwhelmed. Upon closer examination, the reason behind this is actually the competition among underlying public chains. High-quality public chains can attract a large amount of capital and developers, thus driving ecological prosperity.

Since 2017, Ethereum has been recognized as the king of public chains. Whether in terms of market capitalization, technology, or ecological applications, Ethereum is in a leading position. However, since last year, several exchanges have successively launched their own public chains and have vigorously developed the DeFi ecosystem. These emerging public chains have developed rapidly due to low costs, high efficiency, and a rich user base, accommodating a large amount of overflow traffic from Ethereum. In addition, Polkadot, as a newcomer, has also performed well, with its coin price surging while its ecosystem becomes increasingly rich. The traditional public chain Tron is also making continuous efforts, achieving progress in areas such as payments and DeFi.

The blockchain industry has always been looking forward to the emergence of killer applications like Taobao and WeChat in the internet space. After the birth of Bitcoin, blockchain was still simply regarded by the outside world as a speculative tool. The emergence of Ethereum brought smart contracts, providing possibilities for application development, but truly "out-of-the-box" applications are still lacking. It wasn't until the summer of 2020 when DeFi exploded that it truly attracted the attention of a large number of outsiders.

The innovative gameplay of DeFi, such as automated collateralized lending and liquidity mining, has attracted numerous participants. Ethereum, as the main underlying public chain for DeFi, supports over 90% of DeFi applications. However, the influx of a large number of users has also exposed some fatal weaknesses of Ethereum:

1. Low throughput and severe network congestion. Ethereum's TPS is only 15-30, far lower than centralized systems, making it difficult to support the trading needs of DeFi users.

2. High transaction fees. DeFi applications operate through smart contracts, requiring miners to package and record transactions. When transaction volumes surge, gas fees can be pushed up to dozens of dollars or even more.

3. The threshold for use is high. Most of the project interfaces are in English, which is complex to operate, making it difficult for ordinary users to participate.

These issues have provided opportunities for other public chains. Binance Smart Chain ( BSC ), Huobi Eco-Chain ( Heco ), etc. have developed rapidly, taking on a large amount of overflow traffic from Ethereum. The daily transaction volume on BSC has surpassed that of Ethereum, with over 100 projects on-chain. Heco has also achieved over 2 million total addresses and a TVL of 2.8 billion USD in a short period.

Polkadot, known as the "blockchain of blockchains", has seen rapid ecological development and impressive market performance. TRON continues to make strides in areas such as USDT issuance and DeFi, with its ecosystem becoming increasingly complete. These public chains are all competing with Ethereum in their own ways.

In the face of challenges, Ethereum is also actively seeking ways to scale. Founder Vitalik Buterin believes that the most pressing issue is to solve the Rollup problem, which can enhance transaction processing capacity through Layer 2 solutions. Additionally, the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 is also progressing steadily. Vitalik stated that Rollup could increase transaction volume by 100 times while maintaining a degree of decentralization.

In addition to mainstream public chains, some emerging public chains such as Conflux and NEAR are also continuously making breakthroughs in technological innovation. The healthy competition among public chains is beneficial for promoting the development of the entire blockchain ecosystem. Whether it is Ethereum or other public chains, as long as they can continuously improve technology and enrich the application ecosystem, contributing to the mainstreaming of blockchain, they are worth looking forward to. The future path of blockchain is still long and requires the joint efforts of all participants.