The blockchain ecosystem has seen tremendous growth over the last year or so as we are seeing different networks having healthy competition with each other for users and developers as well.
Till a year or so back, Ethereum was the clear leader and any developer who wanted to develop a dApp on the blockchain had a no-brainer choice in front of them and went to develop on the Ethereum network. But things seem to have changed, for the better, over the last year or so. We have been seeing some strong competition to Ethereum for the attention of the developers and the leaders so far in that have been Solana and Polygon.
While Polygon is a Layer 2 protocol on the Ethereum network but without some of the drawbacks of the ETH network like high gas fees and network congestion, Solana is a whole new blockchain by itself which has been placing itself as competition to ETH and it has been gaining some solid traction over the last few months.
All the networks realize that the developers are the key for their growth and expansion and have been trying hard to woo the developers as they know that once the developers come in, dApps get built on the network and the users will automatically follow. Each of the blockchains has its own USPs with Ethereum having a solid, well-established network and community while Polygon cuts down on the fees but with the similar network characteristics of Ethereum. Solana, on the other hand, boasts very low fees and very high speeds up to 50,000 transactions per second which would be helpful for developers who rely on building dApps that need high transaction speeds.
In a significant metric, the USDC in circulation (yes USDC is available both on Ethereum and Solana as well) on Solana has crossed $1 billion as of yesterday which means that the users and the developers are getting warmed up to Solana over the last few months. The trigger for this growth seems to have come in January when Circle, the owners of USDC, rolled out full support for USDC on Solana and since then, the circulation of USDC has shot up significantly as it crossed $500 million in April and has now crossed $1 billion as of yesterday.
There seems to be some healthy competition brewing among the various blockchain network which should be good for the overall crypto ecosystem as it prevents any single network from monopolizing the network and competition always brings in better products to the end-users, which in this case is better dApps.