Alternative to Ethereum: A Smart Contract Platforms

Last Updated on January 6, 2021 by cryptocreed

Ethereum Competitors: Best Platforms for Smart Contract

Ethereum is the second most valuable or popular coin after Bitcoin. At the time of writing, the current market cap of Ethereum is 21 billion at the rate of 211$ each. In January 2018 the price of each ETH hits 1380$.

In simple words Ethereum is

A decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.

Mostly more than 70% of ICO’s are built on the Ethereum blockchain and more than 80% of tokens with a top market cap are based on Ethereum. Developers choose Ethereum for their DAPP’s or project. There are more than 1800 DAPPs are built on Ethereum. But still, there are some problems which need to fixed like when uses of Ethereum networks grow, transactions became very slow and the gas price increased. Sometimes it takes more than hours to get the transaction confirmed.

To solve current problems Ethereum developers are preparing to implement sharding. Which may reduce current problems faced by Ethereum networks.

While Ethereum developers are working on sharding, some other smart contract platforms are trying to take place of Ethereum.

1. Waves

Waves are the smart contract creation platform for those who don’t have much or nil knowledge of coding or programming. They also offer their own DEX (Decentralized Exchange), where you can trade any coin listed on it. Even you can trade your newly minted coin/token.

Currently, Waves is ranked 40th most valuable coin as per market cap.

Pros:

1. Easy to create your own token.
2. Fiat trading (KYC required)
3. Own DEX (trade new-minted coins)
4. Lease your waves (LPoS, lease your waves to waves node to get a return on your Lease and help waves to make more strong)
5.  Limited supply.

Cons:

1. Spammed by scam ICO’s (ease of token creation spammed waves platform.)
2. Not suitable for hardware wallets (Trazor, ledger, and nano)

2. NEO

NEO is called Chinese Ethereum. They are almost the same as Ethereum but with positive features.  They both are providing a decentralized network and smart contract platform without any third-party interference. Their platform supports multiple coding languages not like there they support only solidity language.

Neo doesn’t want anyone to play with forks, their structure doesn’t allow anyone to make a hard fork of NEO, but yes soft fork is possible. You are not allowed to mine NEO token holders are provided NEO gas. It is 14th ranked in coinmarketcap.

Pros:

1. Usage of multiple programming languages.
2. No hard fork means no other useless fork.
3. Neo supports Atomic Swaps.
4. More transaction that Ethereum.

Cons:

1. Hard to develop its own coin compare to Ethereum.

3. Qtum

If you are a developer and looking for developing DAPPs for mobile devices then Qtum is for you. Qtum is a hybrid blockchain platform. Qtum is using the bitcoin blockchain to improve them.  According to the co-founder of Qtum, it proceeds 70 transactions per second.

In coinmarketcap Qtum listed on 29th rank with a market cap of 50.7 BTC.

Pros:

1. Using Pos (proof of stake).
2. Using EVM and using the bitcoin blockchain.
3. 70 transaction per second

Cons:

1. According to some sources, the owner of Qtum involved in BitPay fraud of 200 BTC.
2. Hard to work on the smart contract.

4. Tron

Tron is called a decentralized internet.  TRX is much faster than Ethereum, 2000 transactions can proceed per second. The most positive thing for Tron is that there are no fees on transactions. Tron also supports Atomic Swap and has inbuilt DEX. The language used on Tron smart contract is Java.

Tron ranked 13th most valuable coin on coinmarketcap.

Pros:

1. Investors like Bitmain, Weixing Chen (Uber competitor), Wei Dai (Chinese bicycle company).
2. Partners like Game.com, Gifto, Baofeng, Obike, and many others.
3. Tron CEO launched Peiwo a social app for the Chinese community that has 10M users. CEO may add Tron..
4. Moved to my own coin from ERC20.

Cons:

1. Total token supply 99 Billion.
2. Not many uses of Tron.

5. EOS

EOS is new in the market but with huge attention. Just a few months after launch, they ranked 5th on coinmarketcap. EOS is beyond other smart contract platforms. They mainly focus on Decentralized applications. People think EOS is the best competitor of Ethereum but still, EOS has to do many things at ground level.

Pros:

1. EOS claims they can proceed with 6000 transactions per second.
2. The team behind EOS is very well known for its contribution to the crypto community.

Cons:

1. It’s not easy to work on EOS as it is new in the market.
2. Not used by many people.