The game is on to see which crypto coin will become the most useful, to change how world the world works, from gaming to shopping to banking.

Currently, Ethereum is the reigning champ, with revolutionary smart contracts powering things like the NFT art craze.

Like most revolutions, it’s starting street-style (among techies and “degenerate apes,” we’ll explain later) who are making the new blockchain tech fun, which helps the masses adopt it.

Ethereum is known as the “useful” blockchain as it handles smart contracts, like all those NFT artwork sales where someone buys a pixelated head for $150,000.

You might ask, “Who’d pay that much for that?” Visa International did, in a way to better understand the NFT marketplace.

And it all happened on the Ethereum Blockchain using smart contracts.

But Ethereum isn’t the only blockchain supporting smart contracts…

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum… Ethereum vs. ???

Ethereum is often seen as the main contender to Bitcoin, but we’re covering the main contenders to Ethereum, meaning who will be the king of the hill when it comes to the land of smart contracts.

As many aspiring NFT digital artists will attest, the “gas fees” for listing their items on Ethereum can be really steep.

Of course, there are more upgrades planned for Ethereum, but currently the fees are high and transaction speeds can take minutes or even up to an hour in extreme cases.

That leaves the door wide-open for faster, lower-cost competitors

Here’s 3 coins that I see could potentially challenge Ethereum by being faster and much cheaper for artists to list their works.

CARDANO (ada)

One possible “Ethereum” killer could come from the original Ethereum team itself, Charles Hoskinson. He launched Cardano in 2017 two years after Ethereum. On September 12th, we’re expecting Cardano to go live with their “Alonzo” upgrade, which has been in the works for some time.

The crypto site Forkast says Cardano “is known as a third-generation blockchain, meaning that its advanced technology is trying to solve the issues created by the first- and second-generation blockchains, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum.”

So if they can get the smart contracts going, they could pose a real challenge.

They already have a great reputation, with peer-reviewed work led by Hoskinson and his cool professor-with-the-pipe attitude. He also has a sincere desire to make the crypto sphere a better place. And there’s more…

According to the Motley Fool, Cardano “partnered with the Ministry of Education in Ethiopia to store the academic records of 5 million students on its blockchain” to confirm their academic certification which helps them advance, study or work abroad, etc.”

Cardano is also working to improve Ethiopia’s infrastructure, so they’re making the world a better place, too.

BINANCE (BNB)

Binance has better speed than Ethereum and has already solved some of the issues Ethereum is working through, like the cost of using the network. What’s more, Binance has their own exchanges which gives them a giant user base.

But their strength may be their weakness.

It’s hard to buy BNB outside of Binance, so that limits the pools of investors who can drive the price higher. Still, it’s sitting pretty at $482.40 at the time of writing.

Traders who use the by Binance exchange save on fees if they use the native token, BNB, for their transactions. That gives people a huge incentive to scoop up a chunk just to save on fees.

And there’s also the fact that Binance is already an alternative for people fleeing the fees of Ethereum.

According to Bitrates, “So far, Binance Chain has succeeded in attracting existing Ethereum projects, such as the social media project Mithril and the aviation security project Aeron. It also supports many original tokens, plus “pegged” tokens such as BTC and ETH equivalents.”

So yeah, Binance is a serious player.

SOLANA (SOL)

Solana is faster, lower-cost, and with fully functioning smart contacts. In fact, they just finished a wildly successful NFT launch with the “Degenerative Ape Academy” series.

An insane 10,000 apes sold out in 8 minutes. During the time of this writing, the priciest ape was reaching toward $300,000.

But it gets even crazier…

Fun and games aside (as lucrative as fun and games are, lol), Solana can process 65,000 transactions per second.

How’s that compare to the big boys?

Solana processes transactions:

10,000 times faster than Bitcoin

4,000 times faster than Ethereum

35 times faster than Ripple

2.5 times faster than Visa.

The last one is the humdinger. Solana can process transactions faster than a major credit card company, which could bring a bright future for this crypto coin currently going for around $98 at the time of writing.

Solano is my top pick currently because they already have the speed, the energy efficiency and smart contracts like selling ape-themed NFT’s already making waves.

Of course, there’s a long way to go, which is why we can only speculate. Let’s remember to enjoy the ride, I’m predicting a wild one this fall.

What’s next?

Stay tuned as my picks evolve…

Standard disclaimers: This is not financial advice, and meant for educational purposes only. Note the author may hold the coins mentioned. Remember: Trading cryptocurrency is extremely risky and people should only invest what they can afford to lose.