Following Docker Captain Francesco Ciulla on Twitter, we came across a post that literally took our thoughts out of our heads. For a while, we have been thinking of doing an article on alternatives to Ethereum.
The future is of the Blockchain, decentralized apps, and smart contracts, we can also include NFT and DeFi, and in this future, Ethereum has shown quite a few problems. So, if Ethereum 2.0 doesn’t solve all of Ethereum’s problems, which cryptocurrency will be ready to usurp its throne?
Many fast, safe, and scalable alternatives. But are they actually open and decentralized?
Well, let’s see then what are the actual alternatives to Ethereum that could conquer a prominent place in the future of Crypto. These are stable and reliable blockchains, which wink at speed and practicality without carrying all the negative aspects of Ethereum, first of all, the so-called gas-fees.
A fundamental requirement for the cryptocurrencies examined is the fact that they have free and open-source code, available on public repositories.
Avalanche
Avalanche is an open, programmable smart contracts platform for decentralized applications. Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol.
Deploying smart contracts on Avalanche cost just a tenth of what they cost on Ethereum. High gas fees, front-running, and other adverse effects of slow smart contract blockchains are now a thing of the past. Avalanche Virtual Machines (VMs) enable developers to easily launch blockchains with a wide array of application-specific features. The Ethereum Virtual Machine is fully running on Avalanche with more VMs to come.
Also, the Interoperability of blockchains is the future. The Avalanche Bridge (AB) enables easy transfers of Avalanche and Ethereum assets between blockchains.
The organization account has 43 Repositories and just 1 person.
The main project, avalanchego, has 57 contributors, 300 forks, and 1.3k stars. It’s unsurprisingly written in Go.
- Avalanche Official Website: https://www.avax.network/
- Avalanche Official Repository: https://github.com/ava-labs/avalanchego/
Cardano
Cardano is a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create a possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change. Cardano is built by a decentralized community of scientists, engineers, and thought leaders united in a common purpose: to create a technology platform that will ignite the positive change the world needs. We believe the future should not be defined by the past, and that more is possible – and, through technology, can be made possible for all. We measure the worth of a task not by its challenge, but by its results.
Cardano is a blockchain platform built on the groundbreaking Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol, and developed using the Haskell programming language: a functional programming language that enables Cardano to pursue evidence-based development, for unparalleled security and stability. To build a better future – secure, sustainable, and governable by the many – we have taken the road less traveled. The result of our efforts is a blockchain platform unparalleled in its capability and performance, and which is truly able to support global applications, systems, and real-life business use cases.
The organization account has 11 repositories and just 1 person.
The main project available on GitHub, cardano-token-registry, has 204 contributors, only 120 stars but 500 forks. It is written in the Nix programming language.
- Cardano Official Website: https://cardano.org/
- Cardano Foundation: https://cardanofoundation.org/
- Cardano Official Repository: https://github.com/cardano-foundation/
Cosmos
Cosmos is an ever-expanding ecosystem of interconnected apps and services, built for a decentralized future. Cosmos apps and services connect using IBC, the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol. This innovation enables you to freely exchange assets and data across sovereign, decentralized blockchains. Strictly speaking, Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent parallel blockchains, each powered by consensus algorithms like Tendermint consensus.
In other words, Cosmos is an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate with each other. Before Cosmos, blockchains were siloed and unable to communicate with each other. They were hard to build and could only handle a small amount of transactions per second. Cosmos solves these problems with a new technical vision. In order to understand this vision, we need to go back to the fundamentals of blockchain technology.
The organization GitHub Account has 75 Repositories, 43 people, and 4 Projects.
The main repository, cosmos-sdk, is written in Go, it has 3.2k stars, 1.2k forks, and 286 contributors.
- Cosmos Official Website: https://cosmos.network/
- Cosmos Official Repository: https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/
Polkadot
Polkadot enables cross-blockchain transfers of any type of data or asset, not just tokens. Connecting to Polkadot gives you the ability to interoperate with a wide variety of blockchains in the Polkadot Network. Polkadot provides unprecedented economic scalability by enabling a common set of validators to secure multiple blockchains. Polkadot provides transactional scalability by spreading transactions across multiple parallel blockchains. Polkadot provides unprecedented economic scalability by enabling a common set of validators to secure multiple blockchains. Polkadot provides transactional scalability by spreading transactions across multiple parallel blockchains.
Polkadot unites a network of heterogeneous blockchains called parachains and parathreads. These chains connect to and are secured by the Polkadot Relay Chain. They can also connect with external networks via bridges. Also, Polkadot’s novel data availability and validity scheme allows chains to interact with each other in a meaningful way. Chains remain independent in their governance, but united in their security. Polkadot has a sophisticated governance system where all stakeholders have a voice. Upgrades to the network are coordinated on-chain and enacted autonomously, ensuring that Polkadot’s development reflects the values of the community and avoids stagnation.
Polkadot developers, in 2018, split the implementation. Polkadot is now written in Rust programming language, it has 165 contributors, 5.1k stars and 1.1k forks
- Polkadot Official Website: https://polkadot.network/
- Polkadot Official Repository: https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/
Solana
Solana is a decentralized blockchain built to enable scalable, user-friendly apps for the world. Web-Scale Blockchain for fast, secure, scalable, decentralized apps and marketplaces. Solana is the fastest blockchain in the world and the fastest-growing ecosystem in crypto, with over 400 projects spanning DeFi, NFTs, Web3 and more.
Integrate once and never worry about scaling again. Solana ensures composability between ecosystem projects by maintaining a single global state as the network scales. Never deal with fragmented Layer 2 systems or sharded chains. Solana’s scalability ensures transactions remain less than $0.01 for both developers and users, so very low cost, forever; and also fast speed, forever: Solana is all about speed, with 400 millisecond block times. And as hardware gets faster, so does the network.
Not only is Solana ultra-fast and low cost, but it is also censorship-resistant. Meaning, the network will remain open for applications to run freely and transactions will never be stopped.
Solana’s GitHub account currently has 95 repositories, 13 people.
The Solana main project, solana, has 262 contributors and is written in Rust programming language; it also has 6.6k stars, and 1.4 Forks.
- Solana Official Website: https://solana.com/
- Solana Foundation: https://twitter.com/solana/
- Solana Official Repository: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/
We have chosen the 5 Ethereum Alternatives that we believe are most important, but Captain Docker has also pointed out other names such as Algorand, Binance, or Zilliqa.
There is not only one winner, but all these are solid projects, followed by important communities and – above all – completely open-source.
What do you think of this topic? What are – in your opinion – the best Ethereum Alternatives? Let us know in the comments or contribute directly to one of the projects mentioned, via their GitHub.