"All the Ethereum killers from back within the day didn't succeed, and that i don't expect them to succeed in any respect," Blockdaemon's Ethereum lead told Cointelegraph.
Blockdaemon's ETH ecosystem lead Freddy Zwanzger believes Ethereum will retain its leadership position within the crypto ecosystem over the approaching years thanks to its utility as a sensible contract platform and upgrades to the network following the Merge.
Speaking to Cointelegraph during the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) on, Zwanzger said:
"It'll still be a pacesetter. I mean, obviously, the primary and most significant Smart contract platform, and that is not visiting change."
Blockdaemon is an institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure platform that provides node operations and infrastructure tooling for blockchain projects.
The Blockdaemon employee also took aim at so-called "Ethereum killers" — competing Layer 1 blockchains — which have tried to topple Ethereum from its leadership position but failed.
"All the Ethereum killers from back within the day didn't succeed, and that i don't expect them to succeed the least bit."
Crypto projects that are touted as "Ethereum killers," include Solana, Cardano, Tezos, and Polkadot, among others. Many of those blockchains tout lower fees and faster transactions but have fewer active developers and certain blockchains place h less emphasis on decentralization.
To date, none have managed to displace Ethereum from its number two spot in terms of market cap. Cardano and Solana currently sit within the eighth and ninth positions, Polkadot is ranked 11 while Tezos is ranked 37, in step with Coinmarketcap.
Zwanzger believes that the upcoming Merge will further propel Ethereum onwards and upwards in terms of technology and price.
"There are such a lot of goodies in there, like environmentally-friendliness, [and] all styles of things that are beneficial to lots of individuals. Staking will become more attractive," he said.
"It's a show of strength and commitment that the roadmap is materializing."
The Ethereum Merge involves transitioning it from the energy-intensive Proof-of-work (PoW) mining consensus to a Proof-Of-Stake (PoS) model, and has been tentatively scheduled to be unrolled around September 19.
However, Zwanzger admitted the massive future challenge for Ethereum will still be scalability.
"The original Ethereum roadmap was focused on sharding, but that's not most the case anymore. Now we've got a roll-up-centric roadmap, so scaling via layer 2 solutions."
Currently, the "proof-of-work" consensus model allows the blockchain to process 15 to twenty Transactions Per Second (TPS) consistent with data from Blockchair.
A quantum jump within the number of transactions per second is predicted sometime in 2023 when the Ethereum network introduces sharding.
Sharding may be a multi-phase upgrade to boost Ethereum's scalability and capacity by splitting the complete network into multiple portions so as to extend the network capacity.
Sharding will work hand in hand with layer 2 solutions to further "supercharge" the scalability of the network.
Post-sharding, cofounder Vitalik Buterin has claimed the network are capable of transaction quickens to 100,000 TPS.
