($BTC), ($ETH) – Ethereum Killers Are Advancing At Record Pace This Year: What You Need To Know

Smart contract platforms have reached a combined market cap of $280 billion with an Ethereum (ETH) dominance of 57.92% at press time. Nevertheless, the so-called Ethereum killers are making rapid strides upwards and emerging as challengers to the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

What Happened: The growing popularity of these ETH-alternatives can be gauged by the gains they have made since the beginning of this year.

Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA), which has recently emerged as the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has grown 607.30% YTD. Polkadot (CRYPTO: DOT) is up 259.52% in the same period.

Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) and Fantom (CRYPTO: FTM) have shot up a whopping 848.34 and 3,150.6% respectively.

Near term, these currencies are trading in the green as well with ADA up 3.49% at $1.24 over 24 hours and DOT up 6.85% at $33.17.

SOL and FTM were in the green by 18.14% and 36.28% at $0.56 respectively in a 24-hour period leading up to press time, as per Messari data.

Why It Matters: The gains made by most ETH alternatives outpaced gains in Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and ETH which traded 3.75% and 6.19% higher at $46,137.76 and $1,427.82 respectively.

ADA has been on the rebound after touching a low of $0.82 in the recent past after Venus Protocol community members approved a proposal to add the cryptocurrency as a digital asset on the decentralized money market.

Scaling challenges have “opened the doors to other smart contract blockchains,” according to Shapeshift’s head of research Kent Barton.

Last week, the automated market maker Raydium was launched for the Solana blockchain, which led to a massive spike in the SOL token.

Raydium’s launch brought Solana closer to being a replacement for Decentralized Finance projects on Ethereum, as traders look for ways to beat high transaction costs on the latter.