Decentralized blockchain technology has been completely transformed with the advent of smart contracts. Ethereum completely changed the game, making it easy for anyone to create a smart contract, leading to over 1,000,000 smart contracts now in existence (around 50,000 have been verified). Out of thousands of cryptocurrencies, there only around 30 are smart contracts platforms.
The unique advantages of smart contracts have led to them being prized by both public and private enterprises. Each smart contract platform brings something a little different to the table when it comes to its features and functionality.
What Is a Smart Contract?
Before we begin comparing smart contract platforms, it’s a good idea to understand what a smart contract is in the first place. Smart Contracts are self-executing. Their design is to enforce the terms and conditions of a contract through programmable logic, reducing the need for third-party intermediaries such as brokers and banks. Smart Contracts are an additional layer of processing above the ledger layer, i.e., what is known as ‘the blockchain’, and are comparable to small computer programs that hold a state of information. The contract calculations are carried out by the processing nodes of a blockchain, which change the state of the information. Given that the calculations or processing are carried out by decentralized consensus, the state of a Smart Contract is immutable. Any contract engine that uses a centralized consensus cannot be deemed as a smart contract engine. That would actually be a centralized database.
Top 5 Smart Contract Platforms vs. Nexus
With hyped-up meme coins making their way into the Top 20 on coin listing sites like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, it’s clear that having the best tech doesn’t automatically lead to a multi-billion dollar market cap. In fact, there are only 30+ smart contract platforms out there in the cryptoverse. In this article, we focus on five that, in our opinion, offer the most advanced technology.
Below is a comparative table of features comparing Nexus to 5 other smart contract platforms. The rankings of these, according to CoinGecko, as of 7/24/21 are also included as a reference.
- Ethereum (2)
- Cardano (7)
- Polkadot (10)
- Solana (5)
- Cosmos (25)
Transaction Architecture
Here’s how these five smart contract platforms compare when it comes to their transaction architecture:
Ethereum
While Bitcoin was introduced with built-in Smart Contract functionality, which it calls ‘scripts’. Ethereum augmented these capabilities into its ‘Turing Complete Smart Contracts’. Turing completeness means that someone can write programs (contracts) that could mostly solve any reasonable computation problems. Since the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is turing-complete, sophisticated language can be implemented into a smart contract.
Cardano
Cardano, which was founded by Ethereum and co-founded by Charles Hoskinson, promised to improve on Ethereum’s smart contract platform. Instead of Solidity, it uses Plutus (derived from Haskell) for its smart contact computation. It also differs from Ethereum by using a dual-layer design in its protocol where it splits up computations from settlements.
Polkadot
Polkadot, founded by yet another Ethereum co-founder named Gavin Wood, is focused on the interoperability of blockchains. Its architecture is made up of four components: relay chain, parachains, parathreads, and bridges. The relay chain is for the Polkadot’s shared security, consensus, and cross-chain interoperability. Parachains run parallel to the relay chain and are individual tokens that could have their own tokens. Parathreads are chains that can’t afford a parachain slot or believe it’s not a good idea to have a parachain. Bridges are the gateway for different blockchains that allows them to interact with one another.
Solana
The architecture of Solana allows it to run parallel smart contracts. It uses a modified version of Proof-of-History using PBFT. There is a block propagation protocol called Turbine and a mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol named Gulf Stream. Cloudbreak is the name for Solana’s horizontally-scaled accounts database, while Pipelining is a transaction processing unit for validation optimization.
Cosmos
The architecture of Cosmos involves several different blockchains that interact with one another through a central blockchain ‘hub’. It uses Tendermint, which is a variant of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). The way Tendermint is implemented is through Tendermin Core, which is an application-agnostic consensus engine.
Nexus
You will see from the comparative table that currently all of these blockchains still retain the original blockchain UTOX architecture, apart from Nexus. Instead, Nexus uses
Automated Key Management
Nexus is the only one of these blockchains that incorporates an automated key management system called Signature Chains. A signature chain generates one-time-use private keys that are derived from your Nexus wallet credentials (Username, Password, and PIN). This means you no longer need to backup or manage a wallet.dat file for key storage, or use a plug-in such as Metamask.
None of the five smart contract platforms (Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, Cosmos, and Solana) have automated key management at this time.
Quantum Resistance
Signature Chains also enhance the security of existing DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm) by only publishing the public key’s hash until the key is used, while deterministically generating a new key once the old key is used. This results in high levels of
Signature Chains utilize the following cryptographic functions: FALCON (a second round contender for the NIST Post-Quantum cryptography competition), Argon2 (winner of the password hashing competition, and a superior alternative to S-Crypt or B-Crypt), and Keccak (winner of the SHA3 competition).
While most of these smart contract platforms have a domain specific language, not all of them do. Here’s the rundown for each platform when it comes to DSL.
Ethereum
Ethereum uses a custom programming language called Solidity, which is compiled into an assembly language that is run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Cardano
Cardano is currently developing Marlowe, which is designed to execute financial smart contracts on its blockchain.
Polkadot
Polkadot uses the INK smart contract language that is native to the Substrate architecture, written in Rust.
Solana
Cosmos does not currently use a domain-specific language and does not appear to be doing so anytime soon.
Cosmos
Cosmos does not currently use a domain-specific language and does not appear to be doing so anytime soon.
Nexus
The conditional
Scalability Solution
Fundamental to the future adoption of cryptocurrency is the challenge of solving the “blockchain trilemma'', which is a belief that only two of three qualities; Security, Decentralization, and Scalability, are achievable concurrently. Here are the current scaling solutions used by the popular smart contract platforms:
Ethereum
Ethereum is inherently not that scalable at 15 TPS on its base layer. This has led to numerous Layer 2 solutions being created. Plasma, Raiden, and Rollups are currently being implemented to help with scaling.
Cardano
Cardano also uses a Layer 2 solution for greater scalability called Ouroborus Hydra while using minimal on-chain storage.
Polkadot
Polkadot uses a Layer 2 solution as well called Plasma, just as Ethereum does. It also employs State Channel Network technology from Celor Network.
Solana
Solana uses intra-shard parallelism with the help of its Sealevel runtime, which executes transactions natively on GPUs.
Cosmos
Cosmos has on-chain scalability due to using various compatible networks connected through Zones and operating in parallel to increase transaction throughput.
Nexus
Nexus has designed the
Database
Nearly every one of the popular smart contract platforms uses a different database. Here’s the lowdown on what platform uses what database:
Ethereum
Ethereum uses LevelDB for managing its database. LevelDB has a native implementation in Go and has no schema constraints. However, given that keys are organized “alphabetically” on a disk, accessing values associated with hashes becomes expensive. This is not something that can be optimized any further. Even though LevelDB works very efficiently when it can fit into memory, this stops being the case when additional disk access is needed. This is why performance degradation is a major concern.
Cardano
Cardano takes data from its blockchain and inserts it into PostgreSQL. Created at UC Berkeley, this database is one of the oldest yet advanced, databases around today. Its schema is stable and can be used directly for queries. On-chain data gets stored in tables that are structured to prevent data from becoming duplicated. However, this does mean that extracting data like transactions will require joining multiple tables within a query.
Polkadot
Polkadot decided to go with RocksDB for its database, which was developed by Facebook. Building upon LevelDB, this database’s reads are mostly coming from RAM. Polkadot and other blockchains are using RocksDB for their database needs. However, there is the issue of needing to undo pending transactions and rewrite them to the database. This may be seen as largely negating the benefits of using it for a blockchain’s purposes.
Solana
Cloudbreak is the database architecture designed by Solana. Given LEvelDB cannot handle more than around 5,000 transactions per section (TPS), this smart contract platform decided to develop something that could. Cloudbreak is optimized for simultaneous reads and writes. Since this is a horizontal scaling solution, the database can perform better and be resilient, but it can also lead to less consistency, and there will be more cross-server communication.
Cosmos
Cosmos also uses the Google-designed LevelDB. For all of its strengths when used by centralized networks, it unveils its flaws relatively quickly once a network scales, as is the case with Ethereum and likely soon Cosmos.
Nexus
Nexus has developed its own database called the Lower Level Database (LLD). It is a fast and modular storage engine that is capable of outperforming most of the currently embedded database engines that exist. Tests have shown an average of 0.33 seconds per 100,000 writes and read to disk, making it faster than Google’s LevelDB. LLD multithreading demoing from May 2021 showed 1024 threads at 578M reads per second and 3333 threads reaching 4.2B reads per second. It is anticipated that staying above 1M reads per second will be the standard during live application.
Integrated Distributed Files System
As far as we know, none of the five other blockchains have an integrated distributed file system. As mentioned earlier, Nexus has built its own database (Lower Level Database) and is currently developing an operating system (LX-OS). The file system will integrate into the
The file system is being built to serve as an alternative to centralized clouds owned by companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, enabling people to distribute the storage of their files (e.g., documents, music, images, and videos). Users will be able to determine how many replications they require and then select storage hosting nodes based on their geographical locations and reputation. Agreements between users and storage providers will be via a P2P hosting agreement, depending on the user’s requirements.
Benefits will include privacy and censorship-resistance, allowing groups of people to form private file system networks. With the LX-OS, the file system will offer a distributed computing framework, providing automatic file backups. Users will log in to their Signature Chain on any device to access a synchronized and virtual desktop and file system secured by the Nexus blockchain. Essentially, anyone will be able to offer file hosting services and generate income from extra hard drive memory or run dedicated Content Delivery Services (CDS).
Transaction Fees
Transaction fees are supposed to help secure a network while staying as low as possible. There has been a race to figure out how to best lower tx fees after fees skyrocketed on the Ethereum network ever since CryptoKitties caused them to spike in 2018. The problem of high tx fees has only gotten worse in 2021. Here’s how the popular smart contract platforms compare when it comes to transaction fees:
Ethereum
Users on Ethereum are required to set a ‘gas’ price and limit. This results in higher fees during times of high network demand, which can cause contracts to fail while the contract user still has to pay the costs.
Cardano
Transactions on Cardano can be increased or decreased via a community vote, which would require a Hardfork Combinator event. The fees are usually 0.17 ADA for simple transactions, while sometimes reaching the 16KB maximum transaction size that results in a 0.88 ADA max tx fee.
Polkadot
Polkadot uses ‘weight’ and a per-byte fee instead of ‘gas’ to calculate transaction fees. The current tx fee on Polkadot is around 0.015 DOT.
Solana
Solana's transaction fees are usually around 0.00001 SOL but are known to fluctuate over time. The fees are set by the competition for block space. This will raise the more network traffic there is.
Cosmos
What Cosmos wants to do is accept many tokens to use for paying transaction fees. Currently, the tx fee on Cosmos is around 0.08 ATOM.
Nexus
With Nexus, each transaction (debit or credit) is actually a contract itself. It is free to send and receive NXS, tokens, and assets (NFTs). However, there is a 0.01 NXS fee applied to every simple contract generated within 10 seconds of the last transaction, in order to prevent transaction spam attacks. Each single transaction can contain a maximum of 100 contracts. Therefore, the transaction fee is calculated based on the number of contracts held within it, at a rate of 0.01 NXS per contract.
Adding an expiry to a transaction is free. Whereas, with more complex contracts, a user simply pays the cost of execution which depends on the complexity of the contract, i.e., the operations involved, without the worry of contract failure.
Bottom Line
As you can see, even though these five popular smart contract platforms have market caps that sometimes run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, they don’t provide all the features that Nexus does.
Coming later this year, Nexus is rolling out a massive update called Tritium++. With it comes a lite node mobile wallet, a DAO, pooled staking, P2P marketplace, augmented contracts, object modeling, protected assets, and a hybrid mode that provides tools to developers to create an individual network right out of the box.
Even before Tritium++, there’s already impressive growth in non-code developers joining the Nexus community, largely thanks to
Nexus is slowly becoming noticed as an exceptional and unique smart contract platform that rivals the five popular ones compared to it here, and often showing how it is ahead of them.
Footnotes
You’ll see that Binance Smart Chain is noticeably excluded from the comparative table. BSC is essentially a clone of Ethereum’s smart contract platform. Created by Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, BSC was made as an “Ethereum killer” by sacrificing the key aspect of cryptocurrency, decentralization. Cheaper transactions and greater scalability came at a massive cost of being little more now than a centralized database.
When it comes to Polkadot, the so-called “blockchain of blockchains,” it’s important to keep in mind that it does not support smart contracts natively. Instead, smart contracts are developed by other projects that are built on top of their parachains.
Similarly, Cosmos is an ecosystem of blockchains that can communicate with one another and has been dubbed the “internet of blockchains.” Still, it deserves to be on this list, given its extensive network.
Notably absent from this comparison are transaction speeds. This is because it’s incredibly challenging to make such a comparison in an honest and accurate way. Each blockchain is running on a different infrastructure, for example.
Blockchains are continually evolving as well, making metric comparisons like tx speed become outdated very quickly. It’s also virtually impossible to get consistent metrics from blockchains you are comparing to one another. You’ll get nowhere very fast. You may also be surprised to hear this, but most blockchains haven’t actually been stress-tested. This means the metrics they provide (if you can even find them) are going to be from isolated testnets. The results received from tests also depend on the machines you are using.