An Introduction to the Lesser Known Smart Contract Platforms - Avalanche & Solana
Smart contracts are digital agreements that are programmable and stored on a blockchain. These agreements can be triggered automatically without intervention, which as you can imagine, significantly increases efficiency and reduces both transaction costs and time. They also benefit from the unique characteristics of blockchains, which makes them extremely safe, secure and ideal for storing transactional data. This is why they’re seen as one of the most impressive applications of blockchain technology today.
But smart contracts have the potential to do much more than just offer the automation of transactional processes. They also enable the possibility of building completely decentralized applications (dApps) and organizations (DAOs), which can completely revolutionize the way that we interact with services.
Currently, Ethereum is the most dominant smart contract platform. It was the first network to enable fully functional smart contracts, so it naturally has a first mover advantage. Because of this, Ethereum has the most diverse and built out ecosystem and is home to the most developers building on any network.
Ultimately, smart contract platforms are competing against each other to see who can win the dominant share of the market. In order to achieve this, they need developers to be building amazing applications that make up diverse ecosystems and for users to be using these applications regularly. In order to do that, smart contract platforms need to appeal to developers and also be economically viable to be used by the masses.
In order for a smart contract platform to be successful it needs to solve various problems. First it needs to be scalable. This refers to the capacity to handle large amounts of transactions in a short amount of time. This will keep network fees low, which will allow the masses to use the network. These platforms also need to be secure and remain completely decentralized.
In this article, we’re going to explore some of the smaller - but just as impactful - smart contract platforms that deserve your attention just as much as Ethereum does.
Avalanche
Avalanche is the fastest smart contract platform in the industry, as measured by time-to-finality. Avalanche also has the most validators securing its activity out of any proof-of-stake protocol. It’s one of the fastest, low cost and most environmentally friendly smart contract platforms on the market.
Avalanche is blazingly fast which means that it's possible to host an extreme amount of transactions without the network getting congested. This means that in terms of mass adoption, Avalanche is ready to serve a lot of users.
For developers, the value proposition is simple. Avalanche is a very fast and scalable platform that is able to handle an enormous amount of transactions over a short period of time. This is attractive for developers because it means that their applications will be able to be adopted by the masses as they won’t be priced out of using them.
Solana
Solana is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technology’s permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions.
The Solana protocol is designed to facilitate decentralized app (DApp) creation. It aims to improve scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.
Because of the innovative hybrid consensus model, Solana enjoys interest from small-time traders and institutional traders alike. A significant focus for the Solana Foundation is to make decentralized finance accessible on a larger scale.
Solana is known in the cryptocurrency space because of the incredibly short processing times the blockchain offers. Solana’s hybrid protocol allows for significantly decreased validation times for both transaction and smart contract execution. With lightning-fast processing times, Solana has attracted a lot of institutional interest as well.
The Solana protocol is intended to serve both small-time users and enterprise customers alike. One of Solana’s main promises to customers is that they will not be surprised by increased fees and taxes. The protocol is designed in such a way as to have low transaction costs while still guaranteeing scalability and fast processing.
Closing Thoughts
Part of attempting to predict what smart contract platform will become the most dominant is predicting which platform developers will choose to build on. After all, it's the ecosystems that these developers build that will truly give a smart contract platform its value. If no one is building on a smart contract platform, then there is no need for it. It’s that simple. Predicting what platform developers will choose to build on, and what network users will choose to interact with, will leave you exposed to a network that’s native token will be in high demand and that’s how you make savvy investments in smart contract platforms.