Multiple projects and networks have emerged over the past few years in a bid to compete against Ethereum’s blockchain network, which dominates the market, but few have come close to replacing Ethereum despite the network’s age-old technical problems with scalability issues and network congestion. Numerous alternative competitors have not swayed a majority of the market away from Ethereum and with the current progress of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, it seemed as if there were increasingly fewer reasons to make the switch.
That is, until now.
Polkadot, a decentralized blockchain protocol that not only boasts seamless cross-chain interoperability but also a unique function that allows developers to customize and create their very own blockchains, rose to stardom in September along with the rise of DeFi. Promising enhanced security and a network run on community governance, Polkadot’s blockchain will not need to go through hard forks in order for major changes to be made to the protocol as well.
In mid-September, the market cap of Polkadot’s token DOT eclipsed that of Chainlink (LINK), Binance Coin (BNB) and Bitcoin Cash’s (BCH) as it became the fifth most capitalized cryptocurrency in the market.
As Polkadot was catapulted to the forefront of the DeFi race, the project began garnering greater interest. According to Bloomberg, Polkadot has seen the largest proportion of growth as compared to other major blockchain networks in terms of number of active monthly developers innovating on the network. While both Bitcoin and Ethereum networks saw a decline in activity, Polkadot saw an increase of 44%.
The flexibility and customization offered with directly building unique blockchains that Polkadot brings to developers is indeed an attractive selling proposition. Developers are willing to move from a smart-contract based network such as Ethereum to Polkadot and explore new functionalities which are impossible to execute with smart contracts, says founder Gavin Wood, who is also co-founder of Ethereum.
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