The importance of blockchain-based projects for the future is becoming more and more clear every day. Blockchain technology, which is considered as a revolution in the software industry for its own and which attracts almost all technology enthusiasts from all over the World, has also created an economic sector thanks to its crypto-asset formation. Therefore, when money got into the business, it was filled with thousands of projects all shapes and sizes. Of course, those whose real intent is to make a difference, will eventually thrive and bring blockchain technology into the future while the others will disappear as they never existed. One of these projects is undoubtedly Elrond for thousands of people, including myself.
While I was browsing the official website to get more information about Elrond recently, I came across a comparison of Elrond with some other notable blockchain-based crypto projects. When I was interested in the topic, thought “why am I not making these comparisons an easily readable article?” and decided to write the article you’re sliding through right now. Consequently, you’ll see Elrond has many advantages over its competitors in its field.
Here we go, the first competitor is Ethereum Serenity, aka Ethereum 2.0.
Elrond vs. Ethereum Serenity
● One of the great differences between Elrond and Serenity is about validators shuffling. In Elrond network, at the end of each epoch, only a third of the validators from each shard are shuffled so that communication and storage expenses are optimized. On the other hand, serenity ignores the cost of communication when it comes to reshuffling. Requires a complete synchronisation after re-assignation to a shard which causes a serious overhead.
● Another difference is about consensus group selection as Elrond proposers are chosen randomly from shard nodes in each epoch. Therefore, predictability is limited to only 1, and the possibility of bribing and DDoS is dramatically reduced. Serenity provides a fixed number of divisions that were deemed appropriate during the appointment of the proposers. All proposers can be predictable in advance.
● Although Elrond’s selection of validators for the consensus group is based on the rating, it makes a very small difference and is limited to one seat. Thus, while increasing scalability, reliability is created in communication and storage. Serenity allows multiple seats for validators, resulting in overhead in many shards and penalties in storage and communication.
● Also, Elrond has adaptive solutions for the concepts such as transaction, network and state sharding while serenity cannot produce a smooth response when nodes leave the network because it has a fixed setting that contains 1024 shards and doesn’t have an adaptive way of acting.
Elrond vs. Zilliqa
●Elrond introduced state sharding as a solution to the scalability problem. Due to the need to synchronize the entire blockchain, Zilliqa only partially solved the scalability problem because this causes the overhead issue. And the scalability in this area is a must as you consider.
● One of the great advantages of Elrond over Zilliqa is that the entire blockchain does not need to be stored for Elrond because Elrond uses state sharding. It is sufficient to back up the relevant part of the network.
Since there is no state sharding feature, the entire blockchain must be stored in Zilliqa and the storage load it’ll bring is obvious for the users of commonly accepted blockchains.
● Another difference is about security and efficiency. Elrond uses PoS system against Sybill attacks. This is much more efficient and effective in terms of energy consumption. Zilliqa uses PoW system against Sybill attacks which has low energy efficiency.
● Elrond validator with low system requirements can run on Windows, Ubuntu and Mac. Zilliqa validator needs special hardware running Ubuntu.
● Elrond creates a distribution of smart contract among all the shards so smart contract execution is parallelized. However, Zilliqa provides smart contract on a single shard.
Elrond vs. Dfinity
● Since Elrond uses its own VM, Solidity, IELE, WASM and other languages are available for the creation of dApps
As to Difinity, dApps can be written in Solidity only since it uses EVM for smart contracts.
● Because the current number simply depends on the previous one and the signature of the leader, Elrond has an unpredictable and safe way of creating randomness. On the other hand, Difinity’s VRF with eBLS signature system requires a handful of resources and it is not corruption-proof completely.
● The partial synchronization method Elrond uses creates a high improbability to forking while Difinity uses probabilistic slot protocol which causes a series of forks easily.
● And the worst thing about Dfinity is that it has no provision about sharding like it never existed.
Elrond vs. Algorand
● I have to start with sharding since Algorand doesn’t have such property. This causes a great loss of features as you know.
● Additionally, in Elrond, selection of leader/validators for consensus group is obtained by randomness source and it is unpredictable and unprejudiced.
On the other side, the selection needs more time and no guarantee to create a single leader or the one at all in Algorand. If multiple leaders transpire then slowness in consensus might be present.
● Another gap occurs since Elrond uses a modified pBFT as a consensus algorithm while Algorand goes for Byzantine Agreement.
● Elrond’s selection of validators can be completed in just 4 seconds thanks to sharding when it takes 12 seconds in Algorand.
Elrond vs. Harmony
● Elrond’s consensus model with BLS is simplified and creates faster and higher liveness as well as malevolence-proof system. Harmony has a simple pBFT consensus with BLS multi-signature model in that regard.
● While Elrond provides a true and fully functional state sharding model, Harmony states it has full sharding but practically it is not state sharding.
Another variation happens in randomness as Elrond’s randomness offer is much more effective and unpredictable but Harmony’s offer as VRF and VDF combination for randomness is hard to compute and requires more effort.
Elrond vs. Quarkchain
● As you know, Elrond uses secure PoS with all the benefits it brings.
For some reason, Quarkchain has hybrid PoW with the assumption model causes malicious attacks if anyone owns the 25% of hash power. This is serious I guess.
● There is a huge gap in transaction speed. Elrond’s 4 seconds per block creates cross-shard transactions to be completed under 20 seconds while Quarkchain achieves 8 seconds per block means more than a few minutes for cross-shard transactions.
● In Elrond’s model, each account is managed by a single shard. A real state sharding as it should be.
On the other side, sharding and smart contract handling is not parallel what Quarkchain claims about it. No state sharding at the end of the day.
Elrond vs. Multivac
Multivac is a strong competitor but Elrond doesn’t give a gap to sneak in.
● Elrond’s metachain shard aggregation reduces the requirements and results in less communication which prevents overhead.
On the other hand, in cross-shard operations, there is a larger overhead due to the model Multivac prefers to use.
● While Elrond uses account model Multivac goes for UTXO model.
And Elrond’s reshuffling decreases the liveness issues but Multivac’s resharding which means reshuffling of miners creates liveness penalties.
That’s it! Again, I admire the specialities Elrond present for us and I’m glad that I’m a part of this community.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day!
hopelivescr — Elrond Community Member
