Ethereum is about to get really big!
Staking crypto to earn a yield is going to be what forces big money to get involved in crypto. Hedge Funds and sovereign wealth funds need to start taking crypto that earns a yield very seriously. It is one thing to ignore a token that doesn't do much but how do you ignore Ethereum? There are many Layer 2 solutions out there but all of them are layer 2 to Ethereum and rely on Ethereum's network and trust to facilitate their product.
If you are using Polygon and Ethereum fails, you still fail. If you are using any of the L2s and Ethereum fails, you are going to lose all of your funds. If you are using Polygon and Polygon fails, you could lose all of your money.
If you use Polygon and you buy a wrapped version of Tether, you have multiple fail points. The wrapping contract could fail. Tether could fail. Tether can freeze your funds. Polygon could fail. I believe you could also have some problems if Amazon web services goes down. Oh, you also have to worry about someone stealing from your wallet and potential rug pulls.
Or you could invest is reputable Layer1s like Ethereum and Bitcoin. When it comes to Ethereum, there are 300,000 nodes that store the blockchain data completely. All 300,000 update with every transaction. It would be nearly impossible to bring down the network. You would need to control 51% of the nodes to break Ethereum. It is possible and it is referred to as a 51% attack. The bigger the coin and the more decentralized the mining and staking is makes it very hard to do the attack.
If you remember Shiba Inu gave 50% of it tokens to the founder of Ethereum. By doing this and having him burn most of them, they found a very creative way to avoid the 51 attack.
Binance Smart Chain has two blockchains that it runs. If you trust Binance, you might as well trust BEP2 and BEP20 token standards. If you don't want to trust anyone or anything, you might want to look into Bitcoin and Monero. If you want to be public about your wallet, buy NFTs, buy digital land and build on your digital land, there is no better place to start than Ethereum. Ethereum has high fees but you get what you pay for. Ethereum will become the Defi channel of the rich and the Elite. Another blockchain like Solana or Avalanche will become the blockchain of the people.
Part of Ethereum being so expensive is rewarding the miners and the stakers that keep Ethereum operating. Without those fees, miners wouldn't have incentive to record a transaction. Its a big deal to have 300,000 nodes and so much redundancy. In contrast XRP by Ripple labs has 150 nodes and Ripple labs controls 6 of the top 35 Master nodes. If Ripple and its founders wanted to mess with XRP, they could. If Vitalik Buterin wanted to bring down Ethereum, it wouldn't be quite that easy. Now since Vitalik is a genius and created Ethereum there is a chance he programmed some back doors but as far as we know, we don't have to think about Vitalik when we think about Ethereum.
Brad Garlinghouse of Ripple Labs owns at least 6.3 percent of all XRP tokens. That is enough to cause the market to crash. All he would need to do is start selling in big quantities and people would freak out.