The Smart-Contract Platform Seesaw

“Smart-contract platform” is, by far, the most dominant category of newly launched and soon-to-be-launched blockchain projects. Tezos, Algorand, Nervos, Kadena, Dfinity, Polkadot, Celo, and many others support smart contracts and try to differentiate their respective projects through consensus mechanisms, scalability, use cases, or monetary policy. As all of these platforms compete against Ethereum and older Ethereum competitors like EOS, we’ll see wildly fluctuating behavior.

Some projects will soar when their side of the seesaw rises, and slam into the ground when it begins to fall. In this regard, it isn’t surprising to find that as EOS crumbles under its own problems, we’ve observed a quick price increase in a competing token; XTZ. Though there isn’t strong evidence to support this observation, it may be an early indicator that speculators are moving their bets from a troubled horse onto a fresh new-comer.