Why we built our blockchain business on EOS instead of Ethereum
The debate over EOS versus Ethereum has persisted since EOS first launched last year. It was a discussion we held internally when we began the planning process for our own blockchain-based technology.
Our criteria for evaluation was simple: We needed to choose a technology that could support an unbounding financial market, assist with heavy regulation, and is consumer centric.
In the end, it wasn’t a fair fight. To build an enterprise-grade financial product using blockchain with high scalability, low latency and zero transaction fee, EOS was our choice. In our opinion, it is currently the best available public blockchain platform. We chose EOS for several key reasons:
First, and perhaps most obvious, is EOS’ ability to execute more transactions per second than Ethereum. This functionality is essential for supporting a feasible financial marketplace with the potential to scale multiple times over. Established, sophisticated markets are comprised of tens of millions of trades per day. The Nasdaq, for example, records more than 10,000,000 total trades every day the market is open, in a six-and-a-half-hour span.
While no blockchain technology is at quite that capacity, EOS currently can execute more transactions per second than Ethereum. For comparison, EOS can handle 1,000+ transactions per second (tps), whereas Ethereum can currently support 10-20 tps. The all-time high transactions per second number as recorded in the EOS network monitor is 3,996. With Ethereum, it is around 26 tps. On a cumulative scale, this difference only magnifies.
Second, EOS’ design means we can scale our platform with no impact to users, regardless of whatever may be running on the blockchain. This is critical to the longevity of our business and thus an essential criterion for our decision. The EOS platform is designed for parallel execution to scale to theoretically millions of transactions per second.
Third, EOS provides an extremely robust permissions and governance structure. This includes features like account-level authorizations, which in financial markets is critical for functionality.
The EOS platform provides important support by giving account/role level permissions and group level authorizations. In the case of financial transactions, this means determining whether an action is properly authorized. EOS gives fine grained and high-level control over who can do what and when. This feature is like multisig in Ethereum, but a lot more flexible.
Fourth, transaction costs on the EOS blockchain are much cheaper than on Ethereum. This means we can bank on greater profit margins.
On the Ethereum network, there are many pending transactions, to the tune of about 5,000 at any one time. Because of this, users have to pay ever increasing “gas prices” to get transactions cleared. In other words, some transactions in Ethereum will never be executed unless an additional fee is paid to push a transaction into miners’ dashboards. Without this extra cost, transactions would sit in Ethereum purgatory.
With EOS, on the other hand, the transaction processing fee is zero for the end user. The blockchain app developers take on the cost by staking EOS tokens to reserve computing resources like cpu, ram, and net.
Last, but certainly not least, smart contract development in EOS is done using C++. For technology developers, this provides an immense amount of control. C++ is a full-featured and battle tested language, providing reliable functionality for developers and engineers. Since we are building an enterprise grade financial technology product, we didn’t want to take a chance with the relatively young, yet-to-be-proven language used for Ethereum, Solidity. And, we simply find C++to be a superior product that our team was very experienced in.
For these reasons, we chose to move forward with EOS. We also believe these are the reasons EOS will be the foundation for the financial markets of the future. Its design is well-suited for the growth and sophistication of such a market, and we are confident in its ability to support our own design.
Satya Avala is the co-founder and CTO of Ampersand Markets and former director of engineering at Yahoo Finance.
http://bit.ly/2FUbkJa April 13, 2019 at 05:26PM @BruceDayne, @Satya Avala, Ampersand Markets April 13, 2019 at 07:24PM