After the L1 war, who will still be standing?

The battle between today’s top Layer-1 (L1) blockchains has been going on for a few years now, and till about a year ago, there was no denying that Ethereum was the clear alpha of the dApp and decentralized finance (DeFi) space.

This was, in large part, due to its first mover advantage.

However, as the crypto industry has evolved and grown tremendously, the balance of power within the industry seems to have shifted quite tangibly.

Furthermore, Ethereum’s core framework has shown multiple weaknesses recently.

To elaborate, since 2020, Ethereum’s native gas fee prices have continued to rise and regularly fall. Moreover, the average daily cost of facilitating a transaction peaked at $196 on May 1, 2022.

As a result, the issue commonly referred to as the ‘blockchain trilemma’ — talks about a problem outlined by ETH founder Vitalik Buterin.

He argued that a blockchain network couldn’t possess speed, scalability, and security all at once — it has to become more glaring.

It is also worth noting that amid the raging top Layer-1 (L-1) battle, apart from Bitcoin, most people cannot imagine any of the alternatives in the market today (such as Solana, Binance Smart Chain, etc.) not being compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

However, with a host of new top Layer-1 solutions making their way into the market recently — especially those that are functionally relatively superior to Ethereum — the tide seems to be turning quickly.

L-1’s have moved beyond the EVM model

While there is no denying that projects like Ethereum have helped bring a lot of real-world utility to the crypto world, several projects are now addressing the shortcomings of Ethereum-centric ecosystems.

Radix is one such platform, tackling the issue of scalability and true decentralization using its unique consensus mechanism called ‘Cerberus.’ 

It has been designed using a host of unique functional modules that no other blockchain today utilizes, allowing it to scale infinitely and offer an extremely high level of data throughput.

In fact, in its current iteration, Radix is capable of transaction speeds that are exponentially higher than that of Ethereum, with the project having exhibited speeds of 1+M TPS during live trials.

By deploying its very own version of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine — i.e., the Radix Engine (RE) — the project is ushering in a significant shift in the development of dApp.

In this regard, Radix’s native smart contracts (called ‘components’) are designed to resemble physical assets/ financial building blocks and real-world economic systems.

Blockchain scalability 2.0

As things stand, all of Ethereum’s existing/proposed solutions deploy some sharding mechanism to achieve scalability — be it using a hub-and-sidechain style architecture (like Cosmos or Polkadot) or a parallel setup like ETH2.0.

And while these frameworks do allow for a higher transaction throughput, they compromise on a critical aspect of blockchain technology referred to as ‘atomic composability.’

Simply put, composability is a way through which multiple functions across different dApps can be rolled into a single transaction chain.

And even though composability can be achieved within Ethereum’s existing framework, most of its proposed sharding solutions hamper this capability to a large degree.

This is because separate applications are spread across different operational chains that cannot efficiently come together in a unified transaction sequence.

Radix offers a frictionless alternative that delivers linear scalability without sacrificing translation composability.

Moreover, it can meet the rising throughput demands of its various native dApps over time thanks to its aforementioned ‘Cerberus’ shared consensus protocol.

The next generation of digital finance is here

As the world continues to move in an increasingly decentralized direction, it stands to reason that the need for layer-1 platforms like Radix will continue to rise.

This is because the project offers a unique combination of features and a technical base that supports a rapidly evolving ecosystem of decentralized financial services. 

Lastly, when talking about interoperability, Radix places great importance on community collaboration and manager-like functionality facilitated directly on the ledger.

Additionally, the network allows for simple instantiation achieved via an API, with most’ components’ within its design framework replete with configuration parameters that allow for rapid customizations.

Radix enables developers to create highly interoperable DeFi dApps quickly and more efficiently than ever before.

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