The notion of “Ethereum Killers” has been floating around the cryptosphere for months now. The constant complaints Ethereum users have had about gas price and network speed has prompted this idea to surface, and nobody doubts that the smart contract dominance held by Ethereum since it came live is about to end. But by whom?
Yoav Vilner, a blockchain blogger, based out of New York and Tel Aviv who is also a startup mentor for Microsoft and Google’s “accelerator” projects, wrote a piece for Forbes in which he declared that Qtum and Tron would take over Ethereum’s dominance once and for all.
Qtum and Tron vs. Ethereum
Mr. Vilner had good things to say about Qtum’s hybrid distributed ledger technology; he called it “the next phase of the blockchain.” The Qtum project includes a new virtual machine, based on x86 technology, that’s been recently released.
It offers a better “value proposition” than Ethereum. Because this VM is x86 instead of the usual VM in the crypto community (which are usually based on a single language or technology), the new machine opens up a new world of possibilities because it allows for the chance to develop apps in a broader range of programming languages that still run on a blockchain.
Think for a moment what this means. You don’t need to learn a specialized programming language to enter the blockchain world anymore. With this VM you can use your knowledge about Perl, Python, Ruby, or even Pascal or Basic to create decentralized apps and smart contracts.
Tron has similar features. Its platform doesn’t allow for that wide range of programming languages, but it works in Java which is, maybe, the one language every competent programmer knows, so that makes it versatile and easy to work with as well.
Ethereum has none of those advantages. Developing contracts or applications on Ethereum requires learning “Solidity” which is the platform’s programming language, and most programmers in the world have never even heard about it.
Mr. Vilner also emphasized Qtum’s higher efficiency. Qtum uses a technology called SegWit (segregated witness) which separates transaction signature data from other data such as actual transactions. That makes everything quicker and saves energy.
Another point in Qtum’s favor is its ability to use the Lighting Network, which is an additional layer in blockchain technology (initially developed for Bitcoin) that allows for faster transaction speeds. Then there’s QtumX which will be launched next year, according to Mr. Vilner.
What is QtumX, we hear you ask? It’s the project’s smart contract platform for industrial users such as large corporations. In the project’s blog’s words, this platform will have “stability, and could widely increase exchange efficiency and guarantee the safety of the network at the same time.”
But the new platform is not deployed, and it hasn’t been tested in full yet. So, as things stand, it’s anybody’s guess if it will really be better than Ethereum or Bitcoin.
Mr. Vilner (who also contributes for CNBC) also wrote that Tron (founded and led by the provocative Justin Sun) would change the way in which content producers and consumers interact and transact over the web by decentralizing the internet.
Centralization at Tron
Mr. Vilner also reported Tron’s acquisition of BitTorrent, the largest P2P network on the internet. BitTorrent is becoming part of Tron’s blockchain through Project Atlas. The new torrent network will offer incentives to share files, in the form of Tronix tokens, and that will help Tron become “one of the largest decentralized networks in the world.”
But a closer look into Tron’s governance model reveals that the network will be dominated by 27 block producers, which will be the nodes that validate transactions and create new blocks. These nodes will be the engine in Tron’s blockchain, but some observers consider 27 to be a small number of nodes and it looks too much like a centralized network.
Here, at GlobalCoinReport, we’ve followed the development closely in Tron, EOS, Cardano and many other cryptocurrency projects. EOS has a similar model; it has 21 block producers, selected by the community.
This has been quite controversial as these block producers have been accused of “colluding.” This smells of centralization in a network that swears by decentralization and democracy. The same could happen at Tron.
Is Mr. Vilner nitpicking? Maybe. Keep in mind that 80% of Bitcoin’s nodes are located in China, and nobody is complaining about centralization for Bitcoin (well, Ripple is, but that’s another story you can read in GlobalCoinReport as well.)
For the time being, both Tron and Qtum are very interesting projects that could make blockchain technology useful and profitable for those who get a piece of the action early enough. You could be one of them.
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Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Global Coin Report and/or its affiliates, employees, writers, and subcontractors are cryptocurrency investors and from time to time may or may not have holdings in some of the coins or tokens they cover. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency and read our full disclaimer.
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