Ask HN: What's the best smart contract blockchain?
Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cardano have the largest market caps. Ethereum has the most mindshare. What are cutting-edge devs building on? Which is the long-term winner in the space and why?
also, most devs avoid blockchain like the covid, so likely to get cheeky answers on HN, where blockchain is generally frowned upon
I've been following Elrond's progress for a few months now, with great interest. Some key core features: - Their blockchain application itself id written in Go
- the Smart Contracts VM can run any language that compiles to WASM
- They have an extensive Smart Contracts Rust framework
- Elrond Standard Digital Token is also live on their Testnet and will also be launched in a few weeks, an equivalent to Etereum's ERC-20
- Also, their mainnet is capable at 16k TPS in current config, but it can scale to at least 263k TPS (figure from their pre-launch public scaling tests) which is waaay more than any other blockchain can do, including estimated throughput figures for ETH2
The two most recent features they plan to introduce in the next few weeks are SC formal verifications as well as meta-transactions:
https://elrond.com/blog/technical/
However, I find most interesting about Elrond is they are planning to launch Maiar on the 31st Jan, a non-custodial wallet to make interraction with cryotos easy for the common folk and enable the onboarding of many millions new users.
Does that mean my wallet can be stolen via SIM swap?
Later it says In the event where your phone is lost or stolen, your private key (recovery phrase) can be safely used to recover your funds.
...which seems to contradict the "no recovery phrase" bit?
However, the app is still in beta, with GA date on 31st Jan via both Google & Apple stores, so I don't know precisely if its linked to the IMEI or if it fingerprints the phone in other ways to allow recovery of said wallet & prevent SIM takeover attacks.
Looking fwd to the official docs/FAQ addressing this topic as well, which I expect the team will publish along with the app release soon...
The existing liquidity, tooling, number of installed wallets, etc are are vastly better for Ethereum than any alternative platform.
This article gives a good snapshot of the Ethereum ecosystem's comparative advantages in 2019:
https://blog.synthetix.io/cross-chain-infrastructure-revisit...
In 2021, with DeFi liquidity on Ethereum having grown on the order of 50X (from $500 million in Aug 2019 to nearly $25 billion today) in the intervening time, that advantage has only grown.