Definitely not. Ethereum is on top of the DeFi world, for sure. But DeFi is not CeFi. As an analogy: DeFi is to smart contracts as CeFi is to “dumb” contracts. The legal entity behind Stellar has significantly more of the latter than the entity behind Ethereum--which has none, to my knowledge. ... Plus, gas fees. It's currently cheaper to wire money than to send some ETH.
> Plus, gas fees. It's currently cheaper to wire money than to send some ETH.
Wrong. If all you wish for Christmas is to send some ETH, look no further than into ZK-Rollups such as zkSync & Loopring.
1) A transfer costs around $0.01 in fees.
2) ZK-Rollups are not sidechains. These are layer 2 solutions that settle on Ethereum with a novel trust model of 1-of-N: you only need to trust that a single node is honest!
3) Exchanges (such as Coinbase) would eventually support depositing/withdrawing to a rollup, which means most folks would never need to interact the expensive base layer directly.
Sending money across countries has never been cheaper, faster & as secure as it is now on an Ethereum ZK-Rollup.