Ethereum leads with 72% followed by EOS, Cardano, and Tron

Market in need for “new hotspots” as the smart contract platform sector declines

Staking “not conducive to the healthy and stable development of the industry.

Ethereum is still leading the smart contract platforms, accounting for 72% of market share despite the market capitalization of these platforms in Q3 of 2019.

The market cap of smart contract platform in the industry has fallen from 14.9% to 9.8% but still occupies the second place in the industry, reports TokenInsight in its research.

Other prominent projects in this race are EOS (11%), Cardano (4%) and Tron (3%). NEO, Cosmos, Tezos, Ontology, and Ethereum Classic each account for 2% of the share while VeChain only has 1%.

The return of each of these platforms has been negative in 3Q19, registering a sharp decline.

Market performance

These numbers indicate the disappointment of the market with the “smoke and mirrors” since 2017. The market the report states needs “new hotspots.” Development in the market has also been “difficult” because of the worse than expected fierce competition.

The growth momentum of the secondary market changed in Q2 and started adjusting, now this downtrend is further expected to continue in Q4.

Future Prospect

When it comes to development activity, EOS and Tron is leading in terms of commits, as per GitHub data.

Interestingly, Cosmos saw a high degree of code development as well, which has been comparable to Ethereum and higher than most of the platforms. This indicates developers are more interested in the blockchain operability.

Cross-chain and multi-layer architecture became a hotspot in Q3 2019 with sharding making “great” progress as well. Polkadot testnet is already launched and Cosmos’s IBC will be coming at the end of this year.

Development of leading projects

Ethereum also has the best ecosystem of decentralized applications (DApps) in the market and serves as a decentralized infrastructure of the future of open finance, reads the report. Ethereum’s 2,396 Dapps are followed by 634 of EOS and Tron’s 618.

Gambling and gaming are still dominating the Dapps. However, while gaming and gambling account for the majority of Dapps EOS and Tron, types of dapps on Ethereum are much more diverse. This is because of the stability and security of the Ethereum network.

As such, Ethereum has an “unshakable” leading position in the smart contract platform whether it is about financial innovation, lending platform’s lock-up value, or trading volume of a decentralized exchange.

EOS has the highest number of active users but both EOS and Tron active users are on a downtrend.

In Q3 2019, the market expectations from the smart contract platform dropped but sharding technology, cross-chain, multilayer technology, and staking has brought new ideas of the sector.

However, the report cautions that staking is getting much attention from the industry but it is “not conducive to the healthy and stable development of the industry.” While the idea that everyone can be a node may bring new challenges, the unfair distribution of tokens may widen the gap between the rich and the poor.