I was blown away when I read how fast Solana can process transactions. But there’s a new kid on the block: Fathom.
Fathom is even faster than Solana on one important metric:
Solana averages 50,000 transactions per second, versus 14 per second on Ethereum. Fantom is not as fast as Solana, but it’s still way ahead of Ethereum; in a test run back in 2018, its blockchain processed 25,000 transactions per second. But Fantom has a pretty solid claim to being the fastest blockchain if you look at time to finality. This is arguably the most important statistic, as that’s the moment when a transaction has been fully validated on the chain. Fantom’s time to finality is about a second, versus 13 seconds on Solana and more than a minute on Ethereum.
To me, the metrics that matter are:
1) How long until my transaction is done?
2) How much does it cost?
Both Solana and Fathom are very cheap to run, and Fathom seems a little faster in finalizing transactions.
Both are light years ahead of Ethereum. I would expect to see Ethereum slowly fade unless there’s a major update to leapfrog the newer protocols.
Fathom is worth about $7 billion today. Could it one day be worth 100 times that, my bar for highly speculative investments?
I think it’s possible. Visa and Mastercard together are worth $830 billion. Add in American Express, and you’re at almost $1 trillion.
And that doesn’t cover banks that charge tons of wire fees. A protocol that could replace these high fees with near-zero ones could be worth $1 trillion or more.
The question is, which blockchain will dominate? I don’t know.
I would favor backing a lot of promising tokens early in the hope that one of them returns 100 or 1000 times one’s initial investment.
This is the same approach I take investing in startups. It can work well when there are numerous small, promising competitors and the likelihood of a winner-take-all outcome.
But buying all those tokens is a lot of work! An ideal investment vehicle would be an ETF that owns all the major coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc.) and another that owns high speed smaller coins (Fathom, Near, etc.).
The SEC does not allow ETFs to directly hold cryptocurrency. Like so much of what the SEC does, this policy is counterproductive.
It should should approve crypto ETFs so that investors can spread their bets. If the government’s goal is protecting people’s savings, anything that aids diversification is a plus.
I’m excited to see what the future of finance will look like!
We may soon be living in a world where you can send anyone money in seconds for (almost) free. A world in which politicians can’t devalue your savings on a whim.
That’s a future worth building for!
More on tech:
A Day in the Life of an Angel Investor
How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard
This Week in the Venture Bubble
Photo: “Computer Circuit Board” by Defence Images is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
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