Ethereum’s upgrade race puts rival chains under scrutiny
- Ethereum is evaluating 66 proposals for its upcoming Hegotá upgrade, with FOCIL already chosen as the consensus-layer headliner and other ideas targeting privacy, account abstraction and censorship resistance.
- Ethereum still dominates DeFi with about US$41.35 billion in TVL, well ahead of Solana ~US$4.82b, BNB Chain ~US$4.87b, Avalanche ~US$0.43b and Cardano ~US$0.06b.
- Each rival chain is also upgrading—Solana on speed and client diversity, BNB Chain via the Pasteur hard fork, Avalanche with Helicon execution/validator changes, and Cardano through on-chain governed hard forks - creating different trade-offs in speed, security, governance and scalability.











