The two largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, are often compared, and the debate over which network is the best seems endless. And although each blockchain has its own set of advantages, they also have certain problems, including scalability.
If in the case of Bitcoin, the Lightning Network Layer 2 payment protocol solves this problem, then the transition to ETH 2.0 should do the same for Ethereum.
The Lightning Network (LN) has recently reached new heights, surpassing the 25,000 node mark.
The network is getting stronger as participation in LN increases – the total amount of bitcoins within the channels has reached 2,370,588 BTC, which is equivalent to almost $ 111.5 million.
Moreover, over the past 4 months, the use of the network has increased at a phenomenal rate: the number of unique channels has reached 63 thousand, and the number of repeated channels – 4.6 thousand. However, these numbers are still below those required for BTC to become a financial instrument. This is where Ethereum gets its chance.
Ethereum does not yet have a Layer 2 solution for scalability. With ETH 2.0, the network is trying to solve this problem, however the difference is that ETH has more users than BTC. At the moment, more than 7.1 million ETH ($ 23 billion) are placed in ETH 2.0 deposit contracts, which is incomparable with the total presence of LN in BTC in 2.3 thousand.
Secondly, ETH has a better user base. Despite the fact that bitcoin has 869 million addresses, only 4.3% (38 million) of them have a positive balance. ETH has only 189 million addresses, but at least 31% of them have some amount of cryptocurrency.
LN with 25 million transactions per second has an advantage in terms of transaction speed over ETH 2.0, which has only 100 thousand transactions per second. For successful competition, progress must not stop, especially since new players, such as Cardano, must join the race.