For many investors the question is crucial on whether Ethereum will remain the king of the platform cryptocurrencies.
To clarify, the field of cryptos has become very mixed and blurred, with various cryptocurrencies serving different needs - Bitcoin serves as a store of value or as a medium exchange, similar to Dash or Litecoin. Monero or Pivx add the element of increased anonimity in the mix.
Ethereum is often compared to Bitcoin, due to its #2 status, but ultimately serves completely different needs, since it is not made for buying groceries, but by enabling developers to publish their own decentralised applications (e.g. Golem or Augur).
If we consider decentralised applications as the beginning of the new internet, then betting on future winners may thus yield tremendous results. Hence the question is, which platform will finally succeed?
Apart from Ethereum the main contenders are likely to be Lisk, Qtum, Neo, Waves and EOS, each offering their own solution.
Some points to consider: 1. ETH isn't doing all that well actually - slow, clogged and security issues abound. So the race is far from finished.
- different platforms offer different possibilities - Lisk uses Javascript (most popular programming language), whereas Ethereum uses Solidity (few programmers available). Stratis uses C# for B2B blockchain solutions, Neo for instance wants to offer multiple languages (same as Rise).
- Since the race is still ongoing, different platforms are using different solutions for technical issues like scalability. Lisk uses sidechains, which may be superior to Ethereum's single blockchain approach. EOS uses its own graphene technology, which they claim will achieve much higher transaction speed than ETH.
My verdict is that it is still too early to tell who will actually be ahead, thus it makes sense to put money into various platforms to hedge bets - after all you can invest into Lisk or EOS for a fraction of the price of ETH.
ETH is doing a fantastic job as a dapp-investment bank for ICO's and for attracting cooperation partners. But the platform is far from finished and currently unable to actually serve as the place where the next Ebay, decentralised storage or Facebook can be built on - we will see if Vitalik will actually solve these issues, or whether finally a competitor will prove to be simply better.
And at last, why should there be only one platform which rules the entire dapp-kingdom anyways? Programmers are using different languages for tackling various issues, so maybe there is space for several projects.
As an investor looking for potential returns I consider investing in competing platforms to be important - Maybe Lisk, Qtum or EOS may well win out in the end over Ethereum for numerous reasons.
Going back to 2004 it also was far from clear that Google wins out in the race for search engines and not Lycos or Yahoo for instance.
So - happy betting and investing!