Smart contracts/NFTs/DeFi are outgrowing Ethereum. Don't be surprised if Ethereum loses the status as the #1 smart contract platform within the next few years.

We are now entering the phase of Ethereum's adoption where the the demand for dApps is beginning to soar. That should be a great thing for Ethereum, but it actually isn't. Ethereum is now viewed as a bottleneck to progress because it isn't capable to scale upwards as the traffic grows. I've seen some estimates that if things don't change, in a few years gas will be 1000 gwei on an average day and 10,000 gwei on high traffic moments. Eventually people will love using their NFTs, dApps, DeFi more than they love Ethereum, and will be forced migrate to infrastructure that can scale.

Call it Ethereum's fatal flaw, I think it just exposes that fundamentally smart contract platforms and blockchain shouldn't mix. Smart contract platforms should be hosted on a faster, centralized, webserver, not on a clunky blockchain. Blockchains are a network of nodes doing the exact same thing simultaneously and verifying it with each other to make sure each other's record of events is correct. It's intentionally a very slow and clunky process, but is implemented to create decentralization. That slowness may work for something trying to accomplish a simple task like Bitcoin, but Ethereum is trying to be the center for too many things to host on a blockchain. You can't host the world's financial system on infrastructure that can't hand a few thousand people speculating on dogcoins.