Although Eth2’s beacon chain genesis was effective on Dec. 1, analysts expect that updates to Ethereum 2.0 would not be completed before 2022. As such, Messari recently argued that waiting for Eth2’s completion “leaves an opportunity for other low-fee low-latency competitors to eat into Ethereum’s monopoly.”

“Those snake-bitten by rising fees will inevitably explore alternative platforms with better transaction throughput and lower fees if they haven’t already.”

Despite the praiseworthy efforts of Near, Cosmos and Solana to create interoperable bridges with Ethereum as well as moves to establish scalable chains compatible with Ethereum’s virtual machine from Polkadot and Avalanche, Messari predicts that the second-layer roll-up approach would defeat layer-one networks as the crypto community’s interim scaling solution of preference.

Messari describes roll-ups as “new blockchains that process transactions independently of Ethereum” before submitting the transactions to the main chain in batches. Unlike layer-one solutions, Messari claims that roll-ups can fulfill computational processes “without bogging down the underlying network with excess data and computing requests.”

Messari also asserts that Ethereum’s robust community will deter developers from wandering elsewhere, tweeting “While Ethereum competitors will offer similar technical advantages, Ethereum’s strong community will continue to serve as its biggest moat.”

Despite roll-ups still being several months away from being “production-ready,” Messari notes that “a burgeoning ecosystem” has already formed around various roll-up projects, including protocol development from Optimism, Offchain Labs and Matter Labs, and plans for early implementations by Synthetix and Uniswap.

If combined with sharding and proof-of-stake consensus, Messari predicts that roll-ups could allow the Ethereum network to process up to 100,000 transactions per second, an increase in transactional throughput of more than 10,000 times “If rollups pan out, Ethereum should be able to maintain its virtual monopoly on DeFi applications while Eth2 remains in its incubation stage.”

[image: Wallpaper Access]