Key Takeaways
- July 30 marks ten years since the Ethereum genesis block.
- In the early years of Ethereum development, a generation of copycats sought its crown.
- Today, the “Ethereum killer” narrative has died, and rival platforms chase closer alignment instead.
In the years after Ethereum was launched, a generation of copycat blockchains emerged, promising the same smart contract magic with lower fees, faster transaction times, and more capacity to scale.
But on its tenth birthday, the original smart contract platform is stronger than ever, and so-called Ethereum killers look more like Ethereum followers.
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Ethereum and L1 Fragmentation
In 2013, Vitalik Buterin had an idea that would change the world.
Starting with the premise that blockchains could do more than just move coins, the young Bitcoin enthusiast designed a more general-purpose decentralized computing platform centered on the idea of smart contracts.
Ethereum’s original founding team consisted of Buterin and seven other men. But by 2015, the founders fractured due to disagreements over the project’s direction.
For instance, Charles Hoskinson favored a commercial, for-profit approach, while Buterin and others preferred a non-profit model.
Meanwhile, Gavin Wood became disillusioned by what he viewed as faults in Ethereum’s governance structures.
After leaving Ethereum, Hoskinson founded Input Output, the private company that built Cardano and remains the single most powerful entity within the Cardano ecosystem.
Similarly, Wood went on to found Polkadot, an Ethereum rival with governance baked in at the protocol level, helping it to avoid the messy, off-chain dynamics that characterized early Ethereum development.
Emergence of ‘Ethereum Killers’
While they introduced important changes, both Cardano and Polkadot were built on the same central thesis as Ethereum.
Like EOS, Solana, and other smart contract platforms that were launched in the years after 2015, they envisaged decentralized virtual machines that can, in theory, execute any computation that can be described algorithmically (a feature known as Turing completeness).
While it isn’t clear who first coined the phrase, the concept of Ethereum killers became a popular trope among the crypto community in 2016–2017.
The implications were clear. With a clean sheet to work with, these platforms had solved many of the technical challenges that plagued Ethereum.
Wood described the prevailing mood in 2021: “It’s great to prototype things,” but Ethereum “was not going to be the final blockchain.”
Ethereum Scaling and the L2 Revolution
One of the major challenges that Ethereum killers set about to solve was the problem of scale.
Ethereum’s gas limits and 13-second block time were intended to prevent centralization by ensuring regular users could run nodes. But they also end up capping the maximum transaction volume.
Even after repeated upgrades intended to scale the platform, this remains relatively low compared to later blockchains.
Ethereum’s long-term scaling solution—sharding—was part of the planned “Ethereum 2.0” roadmap but proved technically complex and slow to deliver.
In the meantime, however, research into scaling solutions like Plasma, state channels, and eventually rollups, have come to dominate the conversation.
By 2020, Buterin himself had endorsed Layer 2 rollups, at least in the short- to medium-term.
While core Ethereum contributors are still quietly plodding away at increasing throughput on the mainnet, today, L2s collectively process more transactions on a typical day,
There are still decentralization maximalists who lament ceding so much control to centralized sequencers. But in terms of performance, L2s have all but solved Ethereum’s scaling problem.
With the L2 boom shutting down many of the concerns over scalability, the Ethereum killer narrative has largely died.
Including the total value locked on all L2 chains, the amount of capital deployed on Ethereum dwarves any other blockchain. From developer activity to DeFi trading, the combined Ethereum ecosystem has become a titan that no other platform comes close to rivaling.
Chasing Ethereum Alignment
Against the backdrop of rising L2 adoption, platforms that were once positioned as Ethereum alternatives have increasingly sought closer alignment.
Meanwhile, all major blockchains developed in the last five years are either EVM-compatible or have built specialized bridges and compilers to enable interoperability.
In March 2025, Celo became the first blockchain to migrate from an independent Layer 1 to an Ethereum L2.
Ethereum’s gravity has become so strong that even established projects with a strong community behind them are being sucked into its orbit.
For every Bitcoin purist who wants to maintain the network as a decentralized BTC ledger and nothing more, there is another who embraces EVM sidechains like Rootstock, Botanix, etc.
Meanwhile, even the projects that were initially pitched as Ethereum killers have moved toward greater interoperability.
Polkadot developer Parity has built a range of Substrate (Polkadot’s developer kit) modules that allow chains to emulate Ethereum’s transaction format and EVM execution environment.
Since 2020, IO and other Cardano developers have launched several initiatives aimed at making Ethereum contract deployment easier on Cardano-based networks, including an EVM-compatible sidechain, Milkomeda.
Blockchain Walls and Bridges
Efforts to align divergent blockchains have also emerged from within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Perhaps the most significant of these is the ongoing development of Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM), which could one day bring down the largest technical barrier preventing greater interoperability with WASM-based chains like ICP, NEAR, as well as all Cosmos and Polkadot chains.
The significance of this harks back to one of Wood’s criticisms of Ethereum all those years ago.
“Early blockchains were like walled gardens closed off to other networks,” he wrote in the Polkadot white paper. In contrast, Polkadot’s “heterogeneous multi-chain system” would scale horizontally, with data and value moving freely between interconnected blockchains.
But without Ethereum-compatibility, Polkadot and other multi-chain architectures like Cosmos also risk walling themselves off.
What is finally emerging, nearly a decade after Wood and Buterin diverged, is a more united nation, with Ethereum as its capital city, but with enough roads and a common language to enable peaceful coexistence.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
