How will this compete with ethereum and the likes?
Don't believe it will, ETH and Pexa are two different beasts.... Pexa is a crypto for a pool software project. ETH is a smart contract platform.
ETH's project is ETH, it has ERC tokens on top of it.
Pexa's project is a mining pool software (there's more too, I just like the pool software) it doesnt have tokens on top of it... Although it does have "assets" which I guess are like tokens. It is an x16r fork so it has most main features of x16r parent, ravencoin