Short story
The first and still the most famous cryptocurrency is bitcoin. You hear about bitcoin from every iron and, probably, you had to spend the last couple of years somewhere in a cave meditating with Buddhist monks in order to know nothing about it. Although who knows, maybe the monks are already mining a little… After bitcoin, the ether blockchain appeared. He solved one serious problem – significantly expanded the ability to create smart contracts, which in turn expanded the scope for cryptocurrencies. If bitcoin is mainly used either for speculation or for long-term investments ( HODL! ), then on the ether blockchain, thanks to smart contracts, a whole ecosystem of financial services has grown, which we today call decentralized finance (DeFi).
However, the experimentation did not stop on the ether. Ethereum currently has a significant disadvantage – the throughput of this blockchain is only a few dozen operations per second. Due to the very high popularity of DeFi and NFT, the network is constantly overloaded and this leads to very high transaction costs. Any simple transaction on Ethereum costs hundreds of dollars.
New blockchains have emerged as an answer to this problem – Solana, Tera and Avax are the most popular of the alternative blockchains, they are able to support from several thousand to tens of thousands of operations per second, thereby reducing the cost of transactions by about 1,000 times. For example, on the Terra blockchain, small transactions cost a few cents
