In the realm of smart contract platforms, there’s Ethereum and then there’s everything else.

Its potential to become the dominant settlement layer for the decentralized financial system is readily apparent, if not a foregone conclusion. It continues to soak up the majority of users, liquidity, and developer mindshare. As Watkins noted in his Q3 stablecoin recap, Ethereum now settles double the amount of daily transaction volume as bitcoin.

All of this activity however, has come at a cost. Namely, gas costs. Exuberance for DeFi and to a lesser degree, NFTs, pushed network fees to record highs, pricing out retail users and wreaking havoc on non-financial applications. Ethereum developers have fast tracked efforts to solve scaling woes, but there’s no silver bullet solution just yet.

The next twelve months could come to define the smart contract platform wars. Almost every high-profile Ethereum competitor will be live by year-end. With Ethereum’s current gas woes, their timing couldn’t be better to try and redirect developer talent and liquidity away from the smart contracting king.

For a full picture of the smart contract landscape and the scaling wars, read the full report.

Full report