Crypto Is Far From Dead, as These Scaling Projects Show

The question is whether there are any serious projects for developers to work on?

Whereas previous new blockchain projects that touted massive transaction-processing power were limited to "Permissioned" networks, the work being done now goes to the heart of a more exciting scaling goal: a dramatic increase in the capacity of open, permissionless platforms.

In bitcoin's case, scaling was the subject of an ugly dispute between those favoring a block-size increase - an on-chain "Layer One" solution backed by advocates of breakaway cryptocurrency bitcoin cash - and those, such as the Bitcoin Core developers, who preferred off-chain "Layer Two" solutions such as the Lightning Network payment channels model.

The ethereum community's approach to scaling has been more cohesive than bitcoin's, but it has also embraced a more ambitious agenda.

The scaling roadmap includes a shift to proof-of-stake consensus under the Casper project, as well as ethereum's own layer one and layer two solutions.

It might seem a bit unfair that, as these more established blockchain communities have worked hard at these solutions, newcomers have been able to build on some of their ideas and launch new permissionless protocols from scratch that incorporate these and other scaling solutions.

As CoinDesk's newly created Crypto Economics Explorer, or CEX, shows, bitcoin and ethereum are well ahead of all other blockchains on both those metrics.

Other, higher-profile projects are also hard at work developing large-scale blockchain solutions.

CoinDesk's CEX shows a relatively large network and developer pool working on EOS. Cardano, led by early ethereum founder Charles Hoskinson, is now developing a variety of scaling solutions that draw from ideas developed elsewhere.

So long as these projects don't fall afoul of securities regulations, which might force them to return money to investors, these funds will continue to help pay for development, both of protocols and of applications working on top of them.