I’m starting to see Bitcoin and ETH/ other alt coins a kind of mutually dependent relationship. Bitcoin succeeding as a store of value allows that narrative to continue, drawing in institutional investment while other faster projects allow the narrative about changing all monetary transactions to continue. I don’t think maximalists on either side would like the price if the other side failed.
I predict more and more blockchains in the future won't have extraneous speculative tokens (like ETH) since BTC has remained dominant for more than a decade. There are simply less and less reasons to buy or hold ETH when sidechains like Rootstock replicate the technology used on Ethereum...but without needing to use another less dominant less liquid asset.
But BTC is only dominant in market cap, ETH is the most widely used blockchain. Sidechains on BTC have been a topic of discussion for awhile now, and frankly none have gotten a huge amount of traction. At some point the network effects that ETH has are too big to ignore.
But whether the most used blockchain should be the highest in market cap is a totally different discussion. It's possible ETH goes mainstream, but BTC is still valued higher as "digital gold." I have no idea what will be the outcome.
The network effects are on Ethereum, with virtually the entire DeFi space on it.
Moreover, Bitcoin doesn't have the necessary opcodes for secure/trustless bridges to sidechains.
Rootstock, for its part, is controlled by trusted third parties, so doesn't come close to providing the trustless-ness and permissionless-ness guarantees of Ethereum.
Unsurprisingly, Rootstock has insignificant adoption, with Ethereum having on the order of one thousand times more capital/users utilizing it.
