There have been over 30 blockchains seriously marketed as Ethereum killers. Across three bull markets and nearly a decade, only a handful are still meaningfully active, and none of them have killed Ethereum. Of the 30-plus challengers tracked, fewer than 10 have outperformed ETH over three years.
This isn’t bad luck. It’s a pattern, and it has repeatable causes which we will explore in this article.
What Does “Ethereum Killer” Actually Mean?
The term entered the crypto lexicon around 2016–2017, when the first wave of developers recognized Ethereum’s constraints, like low transaction throughput, high fees during congestion, a programming environment that was slow and expensive for users, and built competing platforms to solve them. The implicit claim was that a technically superior chain would naturally attract the users, developers, and capital currently sitting on Ethereum, eventually making Ethereum irrelevant.
That thesis has been tested exhaustively. EOS, NEO, Tron, Cardano, Polkadot, Tezos, Avalanche, Fantom, and others all launched with genuine technical improvements over Ethereum’s base layer. The market tried them. Most failed to hold on to what they captured.
Why Does Every Bull Market Produce a New Wave of Ethereum Killers?
Ethereum killers launch or peak in visibility during bull markets for a specific structural reason: that’s when Ethereum’s weaknesses are most visible and most painful.
When crypto activity surges, Ethereum’s base layer congests. Gas fees spike (during the DeFi boom of 2020–2021, a simple token transfer could cost $50–$150). NFT minting wars pushed costs higher still.
At those moments, the case for a faster, cheaper alternative writes itself. A lot of users were experiencing real friction, and rival chains are offering immediate relief.
The problem is that those conditions reverse in bear markets. When crypto activity contracts, Ethereum fees drop to manageable levels, and the pain that drove users away disappears. The competing chains that attracted users on the promise of low fees suddenly have no compelling argument over Ethereum’s established ecosystem. And with lower activity, the thin liquidity and shallow developer communities on younger chains become apparent.
The bear market also erodes interest and brings fees down to manageable levels, making alternative platforms far less necessary. This cycle has repeated in every downturn since 2018.
The rivals gain ground when Ethereum is stressed, and they lose it when the stress is removed.
Technical Superiority Doesn’t Transfer Users, Ecosystems Do
This is the most misunderstood part of the Ethereum killer thesis. The assumption is that if you build something technically better, users and developers will migrate.
They mostly don’t, and the reason is that what makes Ethereum valuable isn’t its technical specs. It’s everything built on top of it.
Uniswap, Aave, Compound, MakerDAO, Chainlink. These protocols took years to build, audit, and accumulate the liquidity that makes them trustworthy. A new chain that’s twice as fast still can’t offer Uniswap’s liquidity depth or Aave’s lending infrastructure on day one.
A developer choosing where to build has to weigh technical advantages against the size of the talent pool, the quality of tooling, the availability of auditors, and the capital already present in the ecosystem.
On all of those counts, Ethereum wins by default, not because it’s better code, but because it got there first and has been compounding ever since.
EOS, which has now rebranded to Vaulta, is the starkest illustration. It launched in 2018 after raising $4 billion, and is still one of the largest fundraises in crypto history, with a technical architecture genuinely superior to Ethereum in throughput.
It failed to develop a meaningful DeFi ecosystem, saw developer activity collapse in the bear market, and is now a marginal chain. Platforms like EOS were never able to replicate Ethereum’s developer friendliness, and that kept all the innovation firmly on Ethereum, sealing the fate of those first-generation Ethereum killers.
What Happens to Former “Ethereum Killers” Over Time?
The most revealing trend from the last decade is not which Ethereum killers failed, it’s what happened to the ones that survived. Many of them stopped trying to kill Ethereum and started building on top of it instead.
In March 2025, Celo (a blockchain that launched as an independent Layer-1) became the first chain to migrate entirely to an Ethereum Layer-2. Polkadot’s developer team built Substrate modules that allow chains to emulate Ethereum’s transaction format and EVM environment.
Cardano launched Milkomeda, an EVM-compatible sidechain, specifically to make Ethereum smart contract deployment easier on Cardano networks.
The pattern remains the same. When technically capable projects with real communities reached maturity and looked honestly at where they could grow, a substantial number concluded that competing with Ethereum’s gravity was harder than working within it. Ethereum’s pull became strong enough to bend former competitors into its orbit.
This doesn’t mean every competing chain becomes an Ethereum Layer-2. But it does mean that the “kill Ethereum” framing increasingly misrepresents how the market actually evolves. Ethereum didn’t need to beat its competitors; it just needed to outlast them long enough for the gravity of its ecosystem to do the work.
Why Do Investors Keep Funding New Ethereum Killers?
Despite the historical record, the Ethereum killer narrative remains one of the most fundable stories in crypto. Understanding why reveals something important about how the space works.
The narrative is structurally attractive to both founders and early investors because it doesn’t require an existing ecosystem to validate the pitch. A new chain can promise everything Ethereum has, minus the limitations, and use Ethereum’s congestion as market validation.
In a bull market, this story raises money easily. The token launches, early investors profit on the price appreciation that comes with hype and listings, and the project has resources to build regardless of whether the ecosystem thesis eventually holds.
For investors entering early enough, the “Ethereum killer” trade has been consistently profitable on a short time horizon, even when it fails on the long one.
The token appreciates during the narrative peak, provides exits to early investors, and then declines as the ecosystem fails to materialize. The founders and initial backers often do well, and the retail investors who buy the narrative at peak visibility usually don’t.
See also: Is Ethereum Still a Good Investment After ETFs and Regulation?
Is “Ethereum Killer” Still a Useful Frame?
At this point, the frame is probably more misleading than useful, and the market seems to know it.
Ethereum’s share of the non-Bitcoin crypto market has stayed roughly constant at around 20–22% across the past several years, even as dozens of competitors launched and competed directly against it.
The rotating cast of Ethereum killers has not, in aggregate, taken meaningful market share.
What’s happened instead is fragmentation by use case: different chains have captured specific niches. For example, high-frequency retail trading, gaming, and stablecoin transfers in emerging markets, without displacing Ethereum from the institutional and high-value DeFi activity that generates the most durable value.
The more accurate mental model is that blockchains specialize rather than converge on a single winner.
Ethereum’s gravity holds the financial layer. Those aren’t the same market, and describing one as trying to “kill” the other misrepresents what’s actually happening.
The chains that have built durable ecosystems in Ethereum’s shadow (Solana being the clearest example) did so not by promising to replace Ethereum but by finding users that Ethereum’s base layer couldn’t serve well and serving them. The chains that led with “we will kill Ethereum” as their primary thesis are mostly gone.
That’s probably not a coincidence.
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