Crypto bull cycles often see the growth of alternative blockchain solutions as people look to escape the huge fees of the “big-two” blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum. This happened in 2017 with the “Ethereum killer” chains like EOS, NEO, Cardano, and it happened once more in 2021 with Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos and others.
When markets cool off, like in 2022 and 2023, we see a reverse flow of projects coming back to Ethereum. This time, many chose to deploy on Ethereum Layer-2 solutions, or create their own. But they remain significantly more expensive than using different L1 networks.
Alternative L1s are now much more developed and many more in numbers than 2017. The right mix of activity and development can spark a new cycle for Layer-1 chains, whose costs and technology are often much more attractive for users and developers.
Here are a few names and trends that might see a resurgence in 2024 or later, especially if the market continues on its current upward trend.
Could Rust-based alternative ecosystems recover and prevail?
Solana is arguably the only alternative blockchain that has succeeded in building a strong community of users and developers. Even after the tough hit of having its biggest benefactor, Sam Bankman-Fried, exposed in a Bernie Madoff-esque scam, it has managed to bounce back in full force in 2023.
One possible reason for Solana’s resurgence is its “moat” of having Rust-based smart contracts. The developer community it gathered in 2021 had no way of easily moving back to Ethereum, as they’d lose all their know-how and existing work.
There are other L1s that could go through a similar path, including Sui & Aptos, Near and Cosmos. All of them have unique technology stacks that are often more advanced than the by now 10 year old EVM design. Of course, it’s unlikely that all of them will be winners, especially as a new class of competitors might bring users the best of both worlds.
Is upgrading the EVM the way to go?
The EVM is quite old and perhaps clunky, but it doesn’t mean that it cannot be improved. While Ethereum can’t afford to rock the boat too much, other upstarts might be able to create their own EVM implementations that are vastly faster and more efficient than the original.
Such a path would offer a great alternative, as Ethereum developers can access a much better smart contract infrastructure without having to learn new languages and tools.
One way to improve an EVM is by parallelizing it. This approach takes a page out of Solana’s book, which also has largely parallelized transactions — basically they are executed simultaneously instead of one after the other. The benefits in throughput can be huge, but it will still be up to developers to make use of this new system, so the benefits probably will not be instantly visible.
Sei, Monad and Neon are the main exponents of the parallelized EVM architecture. The former is based on the Cosmos SDK and is a bit of the spiritual successor to the Terra ecosystem. Monad is a completely new chain backed by Jump, similar to Sui. Finally, Neon is an EVM implementation on Solana, acting as its Layer-2 chain.
Alternatives to parallel execution
The parallelization approach, which will most likely require engineers to change existing contracts, is not the only way to scale the EVM. Another approach is to just hyper-optimize the code and use very performant hardware, which is pursued by Telos and EOS EVM.
EOS was the main Ethereum-killer of 2018, and since then it’s had a tortuous journey. After a change in leadership, it pivoted to providing an ultra-fast EVM environment. Currently the EOS EVM is likely the fastest production EVM, with roughly four times the throughput of BNB Chain. The blockchain continues to be optimized to essentially deliver what it was promising from the early days, but without trying to use their own smart contract language.
EOS could end up becoming a dark horse of the L1 world, provided it manages to shake up its previous history. An ultra-fast and ultra low-latency blockchain for EVM smart contracts could enable new use cases like order books and inscriptions — to name a few.
It’s difficult to predict which approach will end up “winning,” but it’s quite likely that each chain will see their time under the sun at some point in the next few months.