If you did not turn a blind eye to the Cryptospace for the last two years, you can tell that not only the stock market has started to undergo an unprecedented rise after a major crash in march 2020 due to the corona virus causing curfews all over the world, the space of Cryptocurrencies has seen explosive growth over the same timespan.
With Insiders being well acquainted with such explosive growth in 2017 – and a harsh pullback in the following years – this time, a lot of institutional investors have joined the mass of retail investors to push Bitcoin above $69k on November 10th, 2021 and Ethereum above $4,800 on November 8th, 2021.
The total global market cap surpassed $2.5Trillion last year and many argue that this time it was not solely about the intriguing technology behind bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general but more so about real practical applicability of smart contracts and D’Apps. Decentralised Finance and NFT’s especially are considered responsible for this new push in value due to a huge amount of new projects launching on Ethereum and on the Binance Smart Chain.
This led to an unprecedented all-time-high for transaction fees as well with a single transaction on the Ethereum Blockchain costing over $1000 during peaks, rendering small scale transactions impossible.
Although these peaks are only common during big hype or big sell-offs, the average fees still have gone up considerably (ranging from50 to 250 gwei), making it less and less attractive for new developers to start building on Ethereum.
So what implications does this have for new developers wanting to enter the blockchain space and how can they afford to purchase cryptocurrency to deploy their projects?
The two most common solutions revolve are
A) Layer-2-Protocols that are basically built upon a Layer-One-Blockchain like Ethereum to help with scaling and can offer reduced transaction fees
2) Next-Generation Blockchains that have a lower coin price and run an Ethereum Virtual Machine where smart contracts and D’Apps can be deployed and interoperability is possible because of bridges (= links to other chains)
Both solutions solve the problem of high transaction fees but only one enables the small to medium sized development teams to stay cost-effective in the long run while also being able to test and run their D’apps in a real blockchain environment instead of a third party integration.
The Layer-2-Solutions for Ethereum certainly have the advantage of making use of a widely acknowledged asset but at the same time it pins them to a single pillar.
A benefit of choosing to deploy a project on a more cost efficient next generation blockchain (that run an EVM) is the possibility to make use of bridges – which is especially interesting for the DeFi sector – that connect to multiple blockchains, opening up cross-chain interactions that allows developers and their project to reach a much broader audience.
Examples for these blockchains that utilize an EVM are SwapDEX, Kusari, Moonbean and Moonriver.
Coin prices can vary strongly but if you are an up and coming developer that aims to enter the crypto space, you don’t have to invest a fortune to be able to deploy an Ethereum smart contract and have the option to choose more cost efficient options.
Instead of having to pay a couple thousand dollars for one Ethereum coin, you can get dozens(Moonbeam) or hundreds(SwapDEX) of coins that offer the same technical utility for the same price and offer you a greater scope of action
