Leading crypto investor Jill Gunter has shared her view on the fierce competition between multiple established blockchains and the arrival of several new protocols.
Gunter’s exposure to crypto began in 2011 during her stint at Goldman Sachs as a derivatives trader. Then she started research on blockchain protocols and worked as a VC at Slow Ventures before co-founding Espresso Systems.
In a recent podcast, Gunter spoke about the three distinct phases of development within the crypto industry that have led it to this moment of heated competition.
The first phase according to Gunter is the era of altcoins. This period was marked by the entry of protocols like Litecoin, Dogecoin, and ZCash, when developers sought to make improvements to the Bitcoin protocol such as changing the block size to increase the throughput of the system, she explained.
“What you came out with was a lot of blockchains and a lot of tokens that had a lot of the same properties as Bitcoin, but changed the feature set,” Gunter said.
The next phase, the entrepreneur claims came with the creation of Ethereum in 2015.
Finally, the modern era of layer-one blockchains began as developers tried to tweak the feature sets of programmable blockchains to address some of the issues with Ethereum that exist today, she said
“Alternative blockchains have not been fully put to the test like Ethereum”-Jill Gunter
Pointing to Ethereum’s high transaction and gas fees as bottlenecks that have left users frustrated. the co-founder then cited the recent Yuga Labs’ metaverse land sale fiasco when people trying to buy NFTs were faced with exorbitant gas fees and failed transactions because of the popularity of the drop.
While alternative blockchains such as Solana and Avalanche offer lower costs and can process transactions much faster than Ethereum, Gunter said these other chains have not been “fully put to the test that Ethereum has been” because they haven’t had to process as many users at once.
What’s more, these newer chains have all “centralized something in some way,” Gunter stated.
Adding that all the layer-one projects out there are “making the right noises,” but have yet to be put to the test by users.