Being the first Blockchain project which introduced smart contracts. As a result, several Ethereum competitors appeared in a very short period. In this article, a deep dive into the alternative to Ethereum.

Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency project according to Coinmarketcap. This Ethereum project aims to be a distributed ledger or Blockchain network and is also a decentralized computing platform. Being part of a rapid evolving high tech environment, many alternatives to Ethereum are entering the markets which could be a serious threat to Ethereum.

Blockchain competitor & Best alternative to Ethereum

Ethereum is the first cryptocurrency project that has also included smart contract as part of their Blockchain. With these smart contracts, the possible uses cases for applications on the Blockchain has increased drastically. Bitcoin, for example, only uses digital money as the primary use case. Ethereum wants to be the first platform in the world which offers online applications but in a decentralized manner.

Ethereum: Where did it all start?

The founder of this new Blockchain network is a young programmer called Vitalik Buterin who was 21 when Ethereum was released back in 2014. Back in the early days, Buterin was also a Bitcoin enthusiast and a huge fan of Blockchain technology. This amazing technology inspired him to come up with this new idea called smart contracts. Smart contracts are coded, self-enforcing contractual transactions that have the potential to replace intermediaries in a wide array of human-to-human, human-to-machine as well as machine-to-machine interactions.

Bitcoin, for example, is a Blockchain network that transfers value(digital money) between two parties. Furthermore, it doesn’t need a third party facilitating the actual transaction. Ethereum also removes the third party in the transaction process but the actual app could be about anything and not only digital money.

Ethereum current state of the project

As of today, Ethereum has grown significantly in size as a Blockchain network and cryptocurrency project. Total market cap of the project is more than 17 billion US dollar and in 24 hours 5 billion US dollar is traded in ETH on a global scale. More impressive is the total Dapps that are residing on the Ethereum platform which is 2233 according to stateofthedapps.com.

To do this, they have set up a highly scalable, with high throughput decentralized system which supports a lot of decentralized Dapps.

Other Ethereum stats

The Ethereum network has a significant number of developers – currently roughly 250,000 developers – that actively working on projects. Considering the size of the cryptocurrency sector, this is a commendable number.

By many metrics, it is evident that Ethereum is one of the best Blockchain projects on the market. However, there have been many concerns across the industry about Ethereum’s scaling issues. As the number of applications on the network continues to grow, the network has been plagued by slow transaction times and higher transaction fees. Accordingly resulting in proclamations about the coming death of the smart contract platform.

Ethereum competitor: what are the alternatives

While Ethereum focuses on fixing its scaling issues, there are some competitors showing up on taking its place as the number one smart contract platform. In this article, an overview of the best Ethereum competitors and find out how serious they are as a threat to Ethereum.

Binance Launchpad

Currently, the biggest Ethereum competitor is Binance Launchpad. Binance Launchpad is a IEO token platform which is running on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. The platform has existed since 2017, when they helped launch projects like Bread (a financial services platform that aims to build the world’s largest decentralized bank) and GIFTO (token of the live streaming app Uplive). After going into hibernation for almost two years during the latest crypto bear market, Launchpad’s blockchain kick-starting activities were recently revived by CEO Zhao and the company.

What is Binance Launchpad

Like I explained above, investors can participate in IEO’s or Dapps on the platform. Other ICO programs launched in the past had to deal with a lot of regulation like knowing your customer programs(KYC). The advantage at Binance is that investors can participate anonymously but there is only 1 condition: investors have to own the BNB coin token.

Interesting platform for investors

A big advantage for companies who start an IEO at this platform is the potential to reach millions of investors. While many of them are trading at Binance on a daily basis. Also, running your token on this platform gives the companies a head start compared to other blockchain projects existing in the market. The most important reason for this is that it’s very hard for these projects to get listed on Binance. Moreover, this trading platform is one of the biggest exchanges in the world and has a big market share in the total market. As an alternative to Ethereum this platform could be a great option!

BNB token & IEO’s

In my opinion, Binance is handling business very smart by allowing companies to start IEO’s on their platform. In addition, the only condition to do so is owning the BNB token. With every new IEO that is launched on Binance, there is automatically demand created for the BNB coin. As a result of this, the price of the BNB coin can go to the moon, which already happened in Q1 and will continue to grow further in 2019.

EOS

Another interesting Ethereum competitor is the EOS project. This Blockchain project is founded by Brendan Blumer, the actual CEO of internet company Block.one. Furthermore, this company has it’s headquarters on the Cayman Islands. Another important person in this project is the CTO, Dan Larimer, who is also the creator of the mining technology called delegate proof-of-stake. Also, this man is involved in Bitshares and Steem, two other existing Blockchain projects.

7 key factors of EOS project

As an alternative to Ethereum this project has 7 key factors they are aiming at:

1. Scalability – Where Ethereum has problems to scale due to the proof-of-work mining algorithm, as an alternative EOS uses delegate proof-of-stake technology which will allow millions of transactions to happen per second.
2. Flexibility – because EOS uses delegate proof-of-stake it will be very unlikely that another Blockchain hard fork will appear on this chain.
3. Usability – very simple use of interface development, self-describing interfaces and database schemes.
4. Governance – updates to the protocol happen on a decentralized manner
5. Parallel processing – calculations and program instructions on the network by smart contracts are handled by multiple processors to reduce the running time.
6. Self-sufficiency – Every Dapp on the EOS Blockchain has an inflation rate of 5% yearly. This to ensure that decentralization is done the right way without bigger monopolists dominating the network.
7. Operating system – Ethereum manifests itself as a decentralized supercomputer, as an alternative EOS states that it’s a decentralized operating system.

Current state of EOS network

According to Dappradar, the site that gives a total overview of all Blockchain Dapps in the market(Ethereum, EOS,TRON). Currently the biggest projects based on volume:

• Poker EOS – This is an online poke game which allows users to play against each other with native EOS tokens. It has 1.4k users over 24 hours and a volume of
  1.364M EOS tokens
• Betace – This is an online gambling game with 234 users over 24 hours and a volume of 441.75k EOS tokens
• Newdex – This is a decentralized trading platformon EOS Blockchain with 957 users in 24 hours and a volume of 323.602k EOS tokens.

TRON

The following Ethereum competitor is TRON. The main reason for being a competitor of Ethereum lies in its founder Justin Sun. Justin Sun is notorious and famous within the cryptocurrency space and has also been involved in the Ripple project. Sun is one of crypto’s youngest stars, born in 1990, yet his youth has not stopped him from rising to the top in awesome style. This young man began his career by studying under Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese giants Alibaba. He studied under Ma at Hupan University for Entrepreneurs, one of the most prestigious schools in the world.

TRON Blockchain project

Currently, the TRON Blockchain project is ranked at an 14th place according to Coinmarketcap, with a total market value of 1.2 Billion Us dollar. The TRON project is also very ambitious and aims to totally decentralize the internet or the web. To do this, they have set up a highly scalable, with high throughput decentralized system which supports a lot of decentralized Dapps.

Popular tokens used on the TRON network

BTT a token that comes from the BitTorrent project is one of the famous examples TRON is currently dealing with. Tron uses the native TRX token as fuel on their Blockchain network. In addition, the TRX token has the following functions on the network:

1. Digital currency / medium of exchange – TRX can be used as digital cash on the Blockchain which is similar to Bitcoin
2. Provide rights and privileges – Owning TRX gives you the rights to receive airdrops and also gives you voting rights
3. Creation of TRC10/TRC20 tokens – For content creators and developers on the chain. They can create their own tokens and host them on the chain.
4. Investment – Investors can hold or acquire more TRX to speculate of a rise I price in the future.

Cardano

Cardano is the next Blockchain project which could be a potential Ethereum competitor.

Founded in 2015, Cardano refers to its “the first blockchain platform to evolve out of a scientific philosophy and a research-first driven approach.” Similarly to Ethereum, Cardano supports smart contracts and decentralized applications.

Scientific Blockchain project

Cardano differs from other Blockchain projects for exclusively using academically peer-reviewed open-source code. As a result, they will build a smooth-running network that programmers and developers can build applications on.

Compared to the other discussed Ethereum competitors, it’s a young project, which took off on September 2017. Since then, the core developers have shown a lot of effort in the Daedelus wallet. Also, they transferred the ADA coin to their Ouroboros mining proof of stake mechanism.

Blockchain and smart contracts

Additionally, Cardano has higher transaction speeds (257 TPS) than Ethereum and utilizes a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, called Ouroboros. This mechanism boasts of being the only consensus protocol with mathematically proven security. Furthermore, the team is developing a protocol that will have the ability to process cross-chain smart contracts and build a bridge between the decentralized crypto-finance and traditional-finance worlds.

Could Cardano be the next Ethereum alternative?

Worldwide(among scientists) the community of Cardano is growing fast by developers which are a fan of functional programming languages. It’s no secret that this project is using the popular Blockchain programming language called Haskell. On their site they claim Haskell to be “less prone to ambiguity and human error than other languages, they are easier to test and verify from a mathematical standpoint”.

Tezos

Another interesting Ethereum alternative might be Tezos. Maybe you know this project from its ICO back in 2017. In fact, the project team was able to raise 232 million USD, which was the biggest at that time. Unfortunately, not long after the ICO launch, things got bad for the project. One of the main investors got greedy and wanted to cash out, resulting in a lawsuit. Also, the SEC got involved which made things worse and delayed the ultimate goal of the project. Finally, in 2018 the mainnet got a ‘go’ and went life which gave birth to another decentralized blockchain platform.

What is Tezos and who founded it?

Tezos can be considered as the main Ethereum competitor which is currently steadily ranked at 11th place on CMC. Furthermore, Tezos is developed by ex-Morgan Stanley analyst Arthur Breitman. Besides, this Breitman is one of the founders of a Swiss company called DLS the company behind this non-profit blockchain project. Currently, Tezos source code is made public by the Tezos Foundation which makes it able for other programmers in the space to extend the project.

So what is Tezos all about? Tezos is a multi-purpose platform that supports dApps and smart contracts. Additionally, it aims to combine a self-correcting protocol and on-chain governance to manage network modifications. Also, the Tezos network uses a token called XTZ for monetization and is created by a process called ‘baking’. Bakers are nodes that can de be deposited with XTZ tokens for staking purposes. Also, these nodes can sign and publish new blocks on chain. Other nodes that are called witnesses will validate this newly created blocks. Besides, Tezos uses a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) and supports Turing complete smart contracts. Tezos is implemented in the OCaml programming language, which is said to offer ‘functional, imperative, and object-oriented styles’.

Actual use cases on Tezos

The founder of this project has a strong background in finance and it isn’t a surprise that the first use case is about financial assets. Moreover, two of the bigger investment firms BTG Pactual and Elevated Returns are working with STO’s on the platform.

NEO

The last Ethereum competitor in the list is the NEO project or “The Ethereum of China”. In the first place, the project started as “Antshares” in 2014 but was rebranded to NEO in June 2017. NEO was founded by two rounds of crowd sales; the first was in October 2015 were 17.5 million NEO tokens were sold for $550.000. The second round followed quickly, which contained 22.5 million tokens and was worth 4.5 million US dollar.

NEO Blockchain project & solutions

This Ethereum alternative focusses on three things to form a smart economy:

1. Digital assets
2. Digital identity
3. Smart contract

While Ethereum uses Solidity as a programming language to set up smart contracts, the smart contracts on the NEO chain can be developed with C# or Javascript. This lowers the threshold for existing developers to learn a new programming language. One of the most famous tokens residing on their Blockchain network is the Ontology token which is also listed on Binance.

Is NEO the one? Like I stated above NEO is called the “Ethereum of China” which also brings complications according to China authorities. China has a very crypto unfriendly policy according to Blockchain projects and they have banned ICO’s before. Unfortunately, their community is strong and they are ranked 17th on Coinmarketcap with a market value at about 638 million US dollar.

Other articles you might like:

• Ethereum: What’s the current state of the project?
• How did Binance became such a succes as a leading crypto exchange?
• Binance Jersey: What is it?
• Ethereum Classic: Why is it still alive?