Tough competition in DeFi sector: JPMorgan with weak outlook for Ethereum

While Ethereum has been dominant in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space for some time, the competition is not sleeping – Polkadot, Solana & Co. are on the rise. JPMorgan is now also warning about these developments.

• Ethereum threatens competition in DeFi sector
• Solana, Terra & Co. challenge Ether’s vanguard role
• JPMorgan pessimistic for Ethereum

Currently, Ethereum still holds a dominant position in the world of decentralized financial markets (DeFi). Its market share is around 70 percent – however, at the beginning of 2021, the Ether network still took almost 100 percent of the DeFi sector for itself, as Bitcoin2Go reports. According to U.S. major bank JPMorgan, this trend could continue, and Ethereum could lose its supremacy. “The optimistic view of Ethereum’s dominance is in jeopardy. The scaling needed for the Ethereum network to maintain its dominance may come too late,” Bloomberg quotes from a note by JPMorgan analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou. According to the crypto expert, Ethereum is simply too slow in developing the project. “Ethereum’s problems are obvious. On the one hand, it’s poor scalability, and on the other, the resulting high network fees. The solution to this is the much-awaited sharding in Ethereum 2.0,” Panigirtzoglou explains. Shard chains are planned for Ethereum by 2023, which should significantly increase transaction throughput, but that is probably “too late” – by then, the competition could have caught up significantly.

Solana, Terra, Polkadot & Co. in the fast lane

That’s because the competition isn’t sleeping: “Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, [Binance Smart Chain], Avalanche and Terra have faster initial ecosystem growth than Ethereum,” crypto investment firm Electric Capital wrote in a report. Compared to Ethereum, these DeFi ecosystems have more active developers, according to the study. As a result, the Ether network is also likely to lose more and more market share to competing networks later this year, JPMorgan said.
“Ethereum is currently in an intense race to maintain its dominance in the application space, with the outcome of this race far from certain in our opinion,” Panigirtzoglou concludes in his note.