Smart contracts are one of the hottest arenas in all of crypto.
And as far as who will emerge the undisputed king of the smart contracts,
well, the battle is only just beginning.
You all know the main players---
Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot and Binance Smart Chain.
But there a few new kids on the block
that could not only rival but possibly even unseat the big boys in the years ahead.
Battling out today are two high performance layer 1 blockchains with tremendous potential.
It promises to be an intriguing matchup.
Let's get it!
Or should I say,
"It's time to rumble!"?
I don't know if I should say that or not.
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My name is Ben.
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In this video, we have a head-to-head battle of smart contract platforms.
For the main event,
today, we have two channel favorites for you.
Fighting out of Silicon Valley by way of Ukraine,
weighing in at well under $30,
the so-called ETH killer,
Solana and its native token SOL.
For those of you new to the channel,
you can learn more about why we're so bullish on Solana
by clicking the link above for a full video.
In the other corner, fighting out of Romania by way of Rivendell and weighing in at under $60,
another channel favorite,
the great and powerful Elrond and its native token EGLD.
If you've been watching BitBoy Crypto, you'll know we're big fans of both these blockchains.
And for full disclosure, we're invested in both of these projects.
But you're not getting bias from us.
This is a well researched video.
Just two smart contract powerhouses trying to claim a smart contract title.
Blockchains, touch gloves, keep it clean and protect yourselves at all times.
Solana launched its mainnet in March of 2020,
but the concept behind it burst onto the scene in 2017
with explosive whitepaper published by its founder, Anatoly Yakovenko.
Yakovenko's genius was figuring out a way to encode passages of time as data.
This led to his creating a unique and permissionless system
for determining time of transaction known as Proof of History.
Why is Proof of History such a game changer?
Well, when used alongside proof-of-stake,
Solana's decentralized clock function creates a unique process,
a series of hash transactions in the form of a verifiable order of events.
This means that blockchain can work at incredible speed without sacrificing security or decentralization.
To say Solana was fast, efficient or economical in its functions
would be the understatement of the year.
Think the Anderson Silva of blockchain technology.
The result?
A formidable blockchain with mind-bending scalability and throughput.
Let's dive into some numbers.
With a processing capacity between 50,000 to 65,000 transactions per second
and a theoretical limit of over 700,000 per second,
Solana is lightyears ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum in transaction per second.
And it's not even close.
I can confirm that Anatoly Yakovenko is no slouch in the brains department either.
In fact, we all owe a great deal to Yakovenko.
During his 12 years at Qualcomm,
he pioneered a lot of the cell phone technology we take for granted today.
With Solana, he has practically invented the Muay Thai of blockchain technology.
The team behind Solana pioneered eight core innovations,
powerful tools that combine to give the timekeeping king of crypto
the elegant functionality of a Swiss watch.
I mean, is it a coincidence that the Solana Foundation is based in Geneva?
Am I right?
We've already touched on Proof of History,
but one of the other of the eight weapons in Solana's arsenal is Sealevel,
the world's first parallel smart contracts runtime.
Do you know of any fighter that can throw an uppercut while landing a spinning back kick?
Exactly.
Only me.
But Solana has a runtime built to process tens of thousands of contracts in parallel.
In fact, it runs so well,
an entire class of applications only theoretically possible before are now a reality.
Oracles running on Solana can provide price feed updates every 400 milliseconds.
With cost of only $10 per 1 million transactions,
you can see why dApps developers everywhere are so keen to jump on board.
SBF chose Solana for the Serum DEX precisely because it was the fastest smart contract crypto on the market.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Solana's ecosystem is growing larger by the day.
In fact, it's booming.
And the reasons why this blockchain is garnering so much hype are clear.
It's a worthy contender and definitely one we'll be following extremely closely.
Next into the octagon is Elrond.
It may be named after a fictional elf,
but don't be fooled.
This blockchain might just be as powerful as the Gandalf himself.
To learn more about why we're such big fans of Elrond and its native token EGLD,
you can check out the link above to our video in Elrond.
But back to business.
How does Elrond square up to the fearsome Solana?
Pretty well as it happens.
Known as the internet scale blockchain,
Elrond's founders make no bones about Elrond's ambitions on the world stage.
Elrond's speed, scalability and security are beyond impressive.
And as a fighter who needs great striking, grappling and takedown offense
to compete at the highest level,
Elrond blows the blockchain trilemma right out of the water.
First identified by the super intelligence known as Vitalik Buterin,
the challenge for blockchains is combining true decentralization, scalability and security.
These are simple enough on a case by case basis,
but few blockchains have been able to meet the demands of each
without somehow sacrificing the other.
So let's start with scalability and Elrond's phenomenal stats.
One feature worth mentioning is that when it comes to its native token EGLD,
Elrond will never upscale beyond its maximum total supply of around 31 million.
With the first 20 million already minted,
the remainder will be distributed as rewards to validators across the network.
This gives it a scarcity akin to Bitcoin,
which has obvious upside for its strong and committed community.
As for scalability on the network,
it's a very different story.
This in part is thanks to its foundational innovation known as adaptive state sharding.
Elrond's team of developers took some of the lessons from other blockchain sharding,
like Ethereum 2.0 and Zilliqa,
combining them into a blockchain that can meet the demands of DeFi, NFTs
and, of course, regular peer-to-peer transactions.
In brief, sharding means splitting the blockchain into smaller pieces known as shards
increasing speed by dividing the transaction between different clusters of validator nodes.
And while this concept isn't unique to Elrond,
they've raised the bar by implementing three different types of sharding---
state, transactions and network.
Thanks to parallel processing,
Elrond can handle a huge number of transactions at scale
to the tune of a mighty 15,000 per second.
According to runs on the testnet,
that's even said to move up to the hundreds of thousands.
The secret sauce to this adaptive state sharding is Elrond's secure proof-of-stake consensus method
which uses random sampling of consensus groups to ensure optimal network security
while guaranteeing the validity of each transaction.
Elrond might not have infinite resources backing them,
but they have an incredible team behind it, some of the best tech and are combining it
to create a super functional platform and seamless user experience.
From a developer's point of view,
Elrond is an enticing prospect,
a platform with real utility to build on,
support for WebAssembly,
where you can write smart contracts in a host of programming languages,
more than Solana's C and C++, Rust and Libra Move.
This broad appeal is reflected by Elrond's thriving ecosystem.
To list them all would take me well past my bedtime.
But as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words.
A great example of Elrond's footwork is in the Maiar wallet,
a mainnet interface for its hundreds of thousands of users.
This product packs some serious punching power.
It's not simply limited to EGLD but also lets you send and receive BNB and Ethereum.
It may well prove the key to unlocking the billion plus users
they aim to have on the blockchain by the end of the decade.
Now, as these two smart contract blockchains throw their hats into the octagon,
you probably can't hear the legions of Elrond fans cheering on their favorite piece of technology.
That's because they're quiet nerdy types.
Because according to Picolo Research,
Elrond has the second strongest community in all of crypto.
Second only to Cardano.
This is in part thanks to their pioneering tech
but also the team's engagement with the community at large
who do their part by staking well over 50% the circulating supply
acting as both validators and delegators on the blockchain,
earning some pretty decent APY in the process.
Yes, if you dare mess with Elrond,
don't be surprised to find yourself answering to an army of devoted elves.
Who will emerge the winner of this bout?
The truth is it's too soon to say.
Aw.
Five championship rounds may take five years.
And given the potential of both Solana and Elrond,
there's a good chance they'll both end up operating as part of a multicoin multiprotocol world.
There really is only one way to find out.
And that's to stick around for the long term.
Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves just how early we all are.
Who knows?
Maybe Ethereum 2.0 will have launched by then.
But whatever the outcome,
we're in for an exciting ride.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Are you team Solana or team Elrond?
Or you're just a neutral observer?
Let us know. Hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.