The Merge: what the "competitors" have to say

"Faster", "more efficient"... Many protocols claim to be "better" than Ethereum. While this argument makes sense from an energy point of view, it could quite quickly disappear in favour of Merge.

"It's true that it will now be difficult to mention Ethereum's energy cost to differentiate yourself," testifies Hadrien Zerah, managing director of Nomadic Labs, a development studio heavily involved in the development of the French-born Tezos protocol, which has been working with Proof-of-Stake since its inception. "We're losing a competitive advantage," he continues.

Now, the teams working on the development of Tezos  aim to capitalise on other features. "The Merge has led us to accelerate our roadmap, we will soon present a new type of optimistic rollups, without permission, which will allow any project to develop its own scalability solution (development at scale, editor's note) adapted to its use," he announces.

Thus, Ubisoft (which is currently working on Tezos) or any other company will be able to develop their rollup. This advance should be available in early 2023. "This should enable us to regain a technological advantage", Hadrien Zerah hopes. "We can't stay with the same value proposition if we want to gain market share," he assures.

At Avalanche, we prefer to stress that Merge changes absolutely nothing in terms of processing capabilities. "There  s no more transactions per second, no concrete improvement, it's just a move to a greener source," moderates Nicolas Lemaître, general manager at Ava Labs, the main structure behind Avalanche's development. "However, I think that Merge should encourage decentralisation in the longer term, because it will be easier for an individual to manage their own node", he concedes.

Avalanche intends to build on its strengths: "Decentralisation, security, finality in the second and blockchains that can be configured from A to Z", Nicolas Lemaître argues. "But Ethereum's move to Proof-of-Stake is good news for the ecosystem, and a step in the right direction," he concludes.