Altcoins could gain 40x on Bitcoin in the next year – analyst Nicholas Merten

Nicholas Merten, a cryptocurrency analyst, recently said that savvy digital asset investors should pay attention to whether alternative blockchain protocols can overtake Ethereum. He called the market competition “protocol wars,” adding that most of the best-performing assets have either been enterprise blockchain or decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, according to The Daily Hodl report.

Merten believes that Cardano, EOS, Neo, Tezos and Cosmos are showing hopeful metrics and are likely to continue to perform well next year. However, the critical question, according to him, is whether these assets can chip away at Ethereum’s protocol supremacy. He believes altcoins stand a chance to gain up to 40x on Bitcoin.

I have no doubt all of these crypto plays that we just looked at are probably going to have higher levels [compared] to Bitcoin [BTC] a year from now than where they are right now. Let’s just get that off the table. Probably the vast majority. Keeping that in mind though… whether or not we can actually get some fundamental development on these chains is going to be the question we need to get answered in order to see if this is going to do a 2 or 3x against Bitcoin or if a variety of protocol plays are going to do a 10, 20, 30, [or] 40x. 

In Merten’s opinion, several blockchain protocols lack only one thing that Ethereum has: a developer ecosystem. He added that while he appreciates Cardano's academic nature, not a lot has been built on it. According to him, EOS is probably in the second-best position in blockchain for DeFi, but he still hasn’t felt the need to use any of the protocol’s DeFi applications.