Ethereum’s blockchain managed to process $29 billion during the weekend within a period of 24 hours, thus managing to outperform other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dash among others.
Bitcoin might be the biggest cryptocurrency in terms of market cap but as far as popularity goes, it seems Ethereum is also gaining more traction. Ethereum’s ability to outperform major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin in terms of processed value is quite a huge thing for the digital currency market. However, it is important to note that the blockchain technology employed in each cryptocurrency is unique and different. For example, Ethereum’s blockchain has been tweaked so that it would facilitate faster transactions and also run smart contracts with ease.
There are many factors that could have contributed to Ethereum’s unusually high value processed. For starters, it costs $2.25 for the average Ethereum transaction while each Bitcoin transaction costs roughly $$28.90. Ethereum’s blockchain has also been engineered to be highly efficient and to support more processing. This efficiency has encouraged other cryptocurrencies to adopt the Ethereum blockchain.
“Ethereum will eventually surpass Bitcoin to become the largest blockchain. But as there is a difference of over $100 billion in the market caps of the two, this is far from happening,” suggested blockchain experts.
Ethereum has been dealing with millions of transactions on a daily basis which is a lot considering that Bitcoin’s network only handles 240,000 transactions every day. The high price of bitcoin transactions and the slow nature of its network means it is not ideal for small payments.
Meanwhile, the disadvantages presented by Bitcoin’s network led to a Bitcoin fork to form Litecoin which is a lightweight and faster version of Bitcoin. Ethereum seems to be taking a different road to address some of its shortfalls. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin announced in November last year that his foundation plans to come up with a new version of Ethereum. This new version would be designed to overcome the scalability problems that plague cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, researchers are also working on creating new proof-of-stake methods that are less intensive on resources such as computing power and electricity.
