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Ethereum’s dominance in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is declining due to high gas fees and excessive congestion, investment banking giant JPMorgan said in a report. In a note published last week, analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou even highlighted that Ethereum’s NFT market share has already dropped to 80% from 95% at the beginning of 2021. The blockchain network could be specifically losing its NFT market share to rival Solana, which has been gaining massive traction over the last year. The bank cautioned that if Ethereum’s loss of NFT market share continues this year, it could be a bigger problem for its overall valuation. Another area of Ethereum’s falling dominance is in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. Last week, in a note to clients, analysts Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, wrote:
“It looks like, similar to DeFi apps, congestion and high gas fees has been inducing NFT applications to use other blockchains.”
Scaling is also required to maintain its dominance in the DeFi sector. According to the strategists, the final phase of the sharding won’t happen before 2023. With sharding being critical for scaling, this means full-blown scaling is at least a year away. In that period, the Ethereum Mainnet risks continued losses of market share to competing networks like Binance Smart Chain, Terra, Fantom, Avalanche, Tron, Polygon including Solana as they have been gaining the biggest share of the DeFi market. These blockchains have already attracted a lot of funding and increased their own user base. The bank noted that by the time sharding of Ethereum is implemented, other ecosystems will grow so extensively that activity won’t return to Ethereum.