>These are insane fees ripe for disruption.
The disruption is already well underway. The only thing that slowed down DEX's eating of a bigger part of the market share is the current high fees on Ethereum.
The disruption is already well underway. The only thing that slowed down DEX's eating of a bigger part of the market share is the current high fees on Ethereum.
I think ETH2.0 or some other network certainly might make DEX's even more popular, but if those swap fees don't come down the centralized exchanges still have a financial benefit to some users. I imagine if they do come down and volume goes up, it lowers the low volume fees on places like Coinbase, which would be nice.
The bigger benefit for the time being is that it allows you to trade pairs that aren't even yet on exchanges (Coinbase is famously slow to add anything, and still doesn't even have multiple top 10 projects). There is also nothing stopping DEXs from partially lowering the fees in the future as the technology stabilizes.
Of course, I don't expect them to eat all of CEX's business but an increasing portion of it and it is a pretty significant disruption.
The main ones they are missing right now, to my observation, are Cardano and Polkadot, which they seem to be very slow on the uptake of. I guess you could say Tether, but understand why they don't have it. And same with Ripple. But I don't think those are a "slow" thing, that's a conscious decision with reasoning behind it.
I think it will take quite some time to do any significant disruption though. At least until there is a good easy place to be. BSC is hard to get in to from the US, at least from what research I have done, and I am willing to put far mor research into it than a 'normal' person would be.
Hopefully the US loosens up and doesn't continue paving everything for Coinbase while the major options available elsewhere are closed off.
>And same with Ripple
They had XRP, they just removed it, presumably because they wanted everything to be as clean as possible for the IPO.
US definitely has a long way to go with crypto in general, on both the access and tax side of things. I hope things will improve, but honestly not sure they will any time soon.
And yeah, the XRP side of things was definitely to cover themselves, and not want to be in that potential mess. I think that is a reason for not having Tether too, it comes with historic baggage even if those issues aren't present anymore. USDC makes sense to limit their own risks, even though Tether is still more popular overall.
What sucks is how much influence they have on overall markets. When they back something and have financial interest in it, and add it to their exchange but not its competitors. I would love to see it more open to other ones faster, but not sure it will be.
Outside of ETH, BSC (Binance's smart chain, the exchange with 9x Coinbase's volume) already has lower fees but the chain is controlled by binance (its 'stock' is the token BNB valued at 40b currently, possibly a good investment) and has an influx of projects due to low fees and easy ETH-BSC migration. There are some other competitors with active smart chains but less projects and many are waiting on ADA's smart chain in early Q2 as well as on some other competitors that (might) solve that and other problems.
ADA (built by an ETH co-founder) specifically solves some of smart contract's current gripes by allowing you to build them in functional languages like Haskell, while being the most decentralized option which might be of interest here.
[0]: https://adapools.org
I should've really said the most decentralized alternative option but even in terms of biggest holders ETH is more top heavy (many controlled by the same people as you said).
> but there's a much easier barrier to entry for new validators.
Is it? The minimum to run a validator is 32 ETH[0] while there isn't even a minimum for ADA. 4 GB of RAM and 1 GB bandwidth[1] (for ADA) isn't much of a deterrent either.
0. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking
1. https://forum.cardano.org/t/a-guide-to-becoming-a-stake-pool...
I think this refers to the k factor, that puts the "soft limit" on decentralization. This I see as a barrier to entry: Ethereum 2.0 is 32ETH and that's it. Cardano has no monetary fee, but has eventual competition between pools, which is variable, likely ongoing cost. Barrier to entry is less defined, and could at some point grow beyond dollar value of 32 ETH (to become a competitive pool). Whereas Ethereum 2.0 will always stay a constant 32 ETH, no matter how many validators exist.
What does it matter here if they have a harder time when none of them are incentivized to even grow to 1%? Even if they do grow, there's plenty of incentive for stakers to move to new ones on the spot. This might mean that e.g. pools will increase their costs due to the risk and stakers will earn a bit less but they still won't grow beyond a point.
Tezos is quite a bit ahead of ADA in that particular respect as they have smart contracts already.
I don't believe ETH2 will ever show up, but who knows.
Full disclosure, I've got holdings in both ADA and XTZ.
[0]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe0...
That's the same as claiming that the "market cap" of a cryptocurrency has some meaning. It really doesn't.
Both of those statements assume that somehow every ETH coin ever minted can be sold for the asking price right now. That's an obviously laughable assumption.
Yes, as I said it is planned to come in early Q2. What comes tomorrow is a necessary step in that direction - the introduction of tokens on the ADA network. For what is worth, I see little reason to doubt that their smart launch will go well - I used their playground and looked at the activity in the testnet and it all seems to be going as planned.
The bigger question is whether enough projects will move/launch there.
For those who don't know, the founder of IOHK (which created ADA) is one of the co-founders of ETH.
I'm confident in his ethics and his ability. I'm not so confident in the ethics of the ETH project anymore.
-edited above since I get rate limited every time I post more than two posts in a day, read the following as a response to the post calling me a liar below:
Ok, I edited to take out the reference to when he left since apparently I made a mistake on the dates -- I thought he was still in the ETH foundation when that happened.
However, he was one of the few voices calling for the ETH foundation not to hard fork to just roll back the DAO hack. The ETH foundation did what was expedient for them financially, and ignored the core tenet of cryptocurrency.
Fact remains, ETH was an immature cryptocurrency, run by immature people, who made immature mistakes. He was one of the few who called them out over it.
You can see what he has done over the years since with IOHK to bring maturity to the space. I think the results with ADA speak for themselves.
He left because he wanted the Ethereum Foundation to be a for-profit while the rest of founders were looking to make it a non-profit foundation. This is by his own account, the other side of the story doesn't look as good for him but I have no idea what happened so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
The majority of ETH 2 is live and more and more ETH is locked to it (~12% right now) so the current 2022 estimate is a bit more realistic than past ones (though, of course it can keep being delayed).