What competitors to Etherium are out there

Ava Labs president John Wu shared his thoughts on the title of “Ether’s killer” on an on-air podcast called GM by Decrypt. Here’s his line.

We don’t like it. We are not positioning ourselves as a competitor to Etherium. There are already too many “theirs versus outsiders” confrontations in the industry.

Ava Labs team

Ava Labs was founded in 2018 by Cornell University professor Emin Gun Sirer. He has previously claimed that Avalanche is the fastest blockchain of the industry’s current major projects. Here’s his 2021 quote on the subject.

For example, Avalanche doesn’t even have a block time, the blockchain only releases a new block when there is work to be done. What matters is how quickly that block gets into the chain. It turns out that the block formation time for Avalanche is now around 750 milliseconds, making the project the fastest blockchain I have ever investigated.

For instance, #Avalanche doesn’t even have block times, it only issues a block when there’s work to do. What matters is how quickly that block is finalized. Turns out, finalization is around 750ms for Avalanche these days, making it the fastest chain I’ve measured.

– Emin Gün Sirer🔺 (@el33th4xor) November 13, 2021

This is interesting: How much cryptocurrency do the developers of Etherium have? Team report details.

John Wu on the podcast also remembered to remind us that the crypto industry is still at an early stage of development even by the standards of the number of developers. He continues.

There are probably less than a million full-time developers in the industry, far less than a million. And there are about seven million on Android alone, four million on iOS, and God knows how many on the web.

That said, Wu urges against focusing on altcoin prices as the only indicator of their success.

I try not to pay attention to the daily change in a coin’s price. And the key word is “trying”. But we are also operators and developers, we care about blockchain adoption, we care about user experience, decentralised applications and developers coming into the ecosystem.

Avalanche’s price of all time

While creators of different altcoins are competing with each other for a higher ranking of cryptocurrencies by capitalisation, Bitcoin is having its own “battle” to become popular around the world. Unfortunately, however, the major cryptocurrency has not made much headway in El Salvador, the first country in the world to make BTC legal tender in its jurisdiction last year.

Percentage of respondents who are aware and unaware of Chivo’s existence

El Salvador’s National Bureau of Economic Research found that despite El Salvador’s cryptocurrency law, not many people in the country are actively using BTC. Researchers Fernando Alvarez, David Argente and Diana Van Patten noted that they personally interviewed owners of 1,800 households in El Salvador about their Bitcoin usage habits. The report states that “the use of Bitcoin for everyday transactions is not as popular and is concentrated among bank customers – educated young people.

Only 20 per cent of survey respondents use the state-owned cryptocurrency wallet Chivo after downloading it. And among those who use it, only 10 per cent spend less cash, with 11 per cent using debit or credit cards less. The report also notes that “no evidence was found of Chivo wallet being used to pay taxes or send remittances” – although this is one of the main reasons the law was passed in the first place.

The vast majority of Chivo users did not pay taxes or transfer cryptocurrencies through the wallet

As a reminder, last year Salvadorans were encouraged to download Chivo, for which they could receive a free $30 in cryptocurrency. Many citizens did download the software, but then deleted it after receiving the money. Chivo also had its own technical problems, which seriously hindered the rapid popularisation of Bitcoin within El Salvador. We can only conclude that the government was ill-prepared to integrate such a radical innovation.


We believe that this stance by Avalanche developers clearly reflects the changes that have taken place in the cryptocurrency world in recent years. Developers are no longer looking to exploit certain advantages solely to outperform popular competitors. Instead, they view the coin industry as something holistic, which in addition does not need unnecessary friction. Obviously, this concept will allow the coin niche to develop more comprehensively and fully.


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