This post is a very brief overview of the 2 biggest blockchain projects in the world.
Ethereum (ETH) and Polkadot (DOT) have grown to become two of the biggest blockchain projects in the world. This year alone, the Polkadot price has jumped by more than 360%, bringing its total market cap to more than $34.4 billion. In the same period, Ethereum's price has gained by 120%, bringing its total market cap to more than $180 billion.
While Polkadot is a relatively new project, it has attracted hundreds of major developers like Acala Network, Advanca, Airgap, and Akropolis, among others. Still, Ethereum projects like Maker, Aave, and Uniswap dominate the Defi ecosystem.
Ethereum
Ethereum’s key strength is its large and established ecosystem of developers, users, and businesses including its rich set of developer tools, tutorials, etc. It already enjoys significant network effects from this ecosystem, making it the de-facto smart contract platform to develop on. Ethereum standards, in many cases, become industry standards such as ERC-20. The key challenge facing Ethereum is scalability. Another challenge is the gas cost required to run smart contracts on the platform. Gas fees are required for the security of the system overall, and to protect the system from being stalled by runaway programs. But as the value of Ether has risen, gas fees for running smart contracts have also risen and have made certain use cases prohibitively expensive. These costs tie back to scalability because if there were more capacity, the fees for each transaction could be lowered.
Polkadot
Polkadot’s greatest strength is Substrate. Substrate is a development framework for creating Polkadot-compatible blockchains, offering different levels of abstraction depending on developer needs. Polkadot is itself built using Substrate. It dramatically reduces the time, energy, and money required to create a new blockchain. Substrate provides a much larger canvas for developers to experiment on, as compared to smart contract platforms like Ethereum. It allows for full control of the underlying storage, consensus, economics, and state transition rules of the blockchain, things which you generally cannot modify on a standard smart contract platform.
Similarity:
First of all, They have one thing in common. Their founder!! In fact, DOT was started by Gavin Wood, a British computer scientist who also co-founded Ethereum.
The two platforms have the similar goal of empowering developers to build decentralized apps.
Differences:
At a high level, the two projects are only partially overlapping. Ethereum is a platform for deploying smart contracts or pieces of logic that control the movement of native assets or states on the single Ethereum chain. In contrast, Polkadot aims to provide a framework for building your own blockchain and an ability to connect different blockchains with each other
Both platforms include smart contract functionality, based on Solidity for Ethereum and Ink! for Polkadot.
One of the biggest differences is design goals. Ethereum aims to be a platform for distributed finance and smart contract execution, whereas Polkadot has a vision of helping people build entire blockchains and integrating these blockchains with each other.
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