In 2009, presumably after years of careful cryptography, cybersecurity, economics research, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto released the initial version of Bitcoin.
The computing community staying in the depths internet forums of the early 2000s have followed each post Mr. Nakamoto had to write, and apart from the many assumptions that have been made, one thing remains clear to this day – peer-to-peer money, electronic cash, or cryptocurrency, whichever name is preferred, has been a direct threat to controlling centralised structures and introduced a set of mind-boggling economic, societal ideas for the new generations to play with.
There is no point in arguing about Bitcoin’s massive influence on modern society, just as much as the influence of Adam Smith’s works on economic theory. To not limit ourselves to handwaiving and abstractions when discussing the current state of digital money, we chall search for the specifics on innovation and the new developments in this very industry.
The Difficult Start Of A Generational Shift
What many of those involved in either trading or holding long-standers like Bitcoin or Ethereum have missed is the fact that although the foundations have certainly been built on these tokens, there are new, sometimes more worthwhile paths to take.
There are a set of problems that have been hovering over BTC and ETH since their births, and to cover them in-depth would in fact take a while. However, the theme seeks a setup, without which we could not move forward into the future.
One of the most notable issues BTC has is the infamous Bitcoin Scalability Problem, and as the number of BTC users increased exponentially over the years, this problem grew as far too. Visa once again became the king yet to be dethroned in the space of digital payments, which hardly helped the utility part of ecosystems thrive.
At the same time, people on social media, especially the freshers in cryptocurrency, started complaining about the incredible fees which quickly became higher than smaller transactions themselves.
The Ethereum gas situation has not been looking fun either, considering that both the monetarily fruitful and less privileged shall pay the same high fees no matter the size of their transactions. Among other things, high gas fees have played a significant part in making digital tokens more of an investment than electronic cash, like Satoshi himself envisioned.
Fixing Poorly Manufactured Protocols
Communities on both BTC and ETH sides have been working on second-layer solutions that would, many assumed, create the long-awaited transactional utility by increasing the network capacity and load, but another set of issues can arise with the introduction of Layer 2 systems.
The aforementioned issues can even contradict with the internationally agreed upon structure of a computer network, having in mind the fact that Layer 2 networks can be systems completely separated from the original, hence not really part of the underlying ecosystem, and that can be troubling for a number of computer scientists.
What these decentralised legacy systems also lack is speed, which is key to a functional and efficient payments ecosystem able to produce real value in the economy. Speed can often be represented as scalability in the crypto community, and in a sense the two concepts are indeed interchangeable.
With this, we may go ahead and compare transactions per second, or TPS, that occur in these networks. Ethereum, on its original network, manages to handle around 15 TPS, although observations vary between sources.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, only manages to host a mere 4.6 TPS. Both of these legacy systems can certainly look pathetic compared to the latest and best-researched networks of Layer 1 nature, which will definitely be covered below.
The State Of Blockchain Communities
As mentioned, growth in the user-count of decentralised ecosystems has resulted in less usability, which, as most people imagine, was the fault of the initial protocol designs.
Despite this, followers of the crowd who thought that BTC or ETH is just a different sort of investment opportunity have been quite fortunate in their endeavours – these people did not have to worry about transaction costs or speed as their primary aim was the purchase.
In such payments infrastructures, when one decided to use cryptocurrencies as pure digital cash – for rewarding others on the internet, receiving microtransactions, or regularly gifting tokens to friends and family – the situation started looking very different from that of an investor’s perspective.
The whole cryptosphere, no matter how many reward opportunities it has to offer, simply does not make sense without utility, especially considering that Bitcoin was invented with peer-to-peer concepts in mind.
Avalanche’s Winning Streak
So, where does such a state of the largest crypto infrastructures leave us? It leaves us on a quest to find the missing puzzle pieces of the blockchain puzzle – get lower fees, higher speeds and scalability, and ecosystems of inherent utility.
To start our search, we start at the gates of the Avalanche Network – one of the fastest, cheapest, flexible and ecosystem-supportive networks whose own ecosystem comes with an Ethereum Foundation-like builders platform. AVAX is one of the most beloved networks for developers and their platform users, and it beats BTC and ETH in arguably every technical metric.
The Avalanche Network can handle ∞ TPS, finalises transactions in less than 2 seconds, and prides itself in energy efficiency, safety, and security, among a thousand other things. Now you may ask, if AVAX is so great, who is building on it?
Projects Relying On AVAX
Avalanche hosts big players like 1inch Network, Kalao.io, Pangolin, TraderJoe, and others, which are creating experiences hardly to be found on any other network, of course mostly because of the AVAX efficiency.
However, there are smaller-scale AVAX projects that are still yet to launch their main-nets and have already contributed highly to the entire decentralised space. SparkWorld*, for one, has invented Fair Prediction Launches, or FPLs – mechanisms designed to ensure fairness, transparency, and fix a whole set of NFT whitelisting issues through new prediction systems.
The project has chosen Avalanche because it is both seamless technically speaking and eco-friendly, and what strike as the most exciting aspects are SparkWorld*’s underlying economically fair design and aim to create NFT ecosystems where players are equal in regards to their opportunities – considering the SparkWorld* launchpad’s gamified nature.
If you wish to learn more about AVAX-powered projects, consider following SparkWorld* on Twitter, joining their Discord server, or simply visiting their website to figure out where the on-chain fairness comes from.
Being limited to what crowds think and act upon can be dangerous, and as we have discussed, the most popular thing might not be the finest one after all.
Good luck on your search for better systems – they are present, just not always visible immediately – and we will be back with more soon.
