If an annual project is selected every year along with the development of blockchain, there is no doubt that 2009-2016 will be bitcoin, 2017 may be Ethereum, and 2018 may be EOS. In 2019, after ten years of development, the blockchain has finally come to the initial stage of the "ten thousand chain interconnection" barrier. Undoubtedly, cosmos and Polkadot are the two important NPCs in this stage.
Cosmos and Polkadot are two king level projects across the chain, which attract much attention. However, they are difficult to understand. This paper will explain the essential differences between cosmos and Polkadot, and better understand their characteristics.
1. Architecture
Cosmos: more concise
Polkadot: more complex
The structure of cosmos is simple and clear. A hub is a chain, and other connected zones are the side chains of the hub. Hubs can be interconnected. Iris, a popular project recently, is a hub on cosmos.
Polkadot's structure is star shaped, with Polkadot relay relay relay chain in the center and parachain parallel chains in the periphery. On the network, there are validator verifier, nominator nominator, collator collector or checker, Fisher fisherman, etc
2. Safety
Cosmos - more like the United Nations
Polkadot - more like NATO
The cost of cosmos simplicity is a slight decrease in security. After all, you can't have both. If the hub and zone are different countries, each country has its own military and sovereignty to maintain security.
The most secure one must be cosmos hub. After all, among all the hubs, the market value of cosmos native token atom will be the highest. Based on the security model of POS staging, of course, the larger the market value, the higher the attack cost, the more secure it will be. Security varies from hub to hub.
Polkadot is similar to NATO, which uniformly distributes military forces and deployment. The military forces (verifier nodes) of the central relaychain and regional parachain are selected and allocated randomly by Polkadot system. In other words, the main network of Polkadot is secure, and all the parallel chains linked in are secure.
3. Flexibility and autonomy
Cosmos - more like Android
Polkadot - more like IOS system
In terms of security design, Polkadot requires that all parallel chains in the ecosystem should be guaranteed by dot tokens to form a unified and closed security pool, while the chain connected to the hub in cosmos is maintained by its own token and verification node, while atom token only maintains the security of cosmos, the hub. This and Android open source, anyone can customize use, and IOS system must be closed by apple to use very similar.
From the perspective of application development and design, Polkadot focuses on creating a closed cross chain new ecosystem, and uses its own Substrate framework to quickly build parallel chains that meet Polkadot standards. It hopes to build a new world through unified standards, and Substrate is also awesome to support all known consensus and modules, and to create a top-level chain in minutes. Cosmos hopes to create an open cross chain ecosystem, focus on the integration of existing chains, and realize the docking and integration of various existing chains through IBC protocol and hub.
From these two comparisons, we can see that cosmos is similar to Android. It will not only not threaten the existing chain, but also be supported by most of the chains, because cosmos increases the interoperability and liquidity of the existing chain on the basis of not affecting the consensus and token of the existing chain.
Polkadot is similar to IOS. Its substrates pose a great threat to the existing chain. At present, he can support the consensus and function of various chains, and can build them in minutes, which is even more perfect than most of the existing chains. If you want to access this Polkadot, you have to give up your own token and security and take over by dot. This is undoubtedly a huge bomb. It is estimated that each team in the existing chain will form a certain resistance to polkaddot.
conclusion
Both projects are still in their infancy and will be fully operational next year - some of the issues I have raised may not be there soon. In conclusion, I began to believe that Polkadot has the following advantages over Cosmos:
1. Application developers do not need to build their own security mechanisms
2. If they can solve the problem of data availability, the inter chain message passing under shared security will be easier
3. They seem to have very high expectations for substrate (wasm, more out of the box consensus algorithms and modules)
4. Focus on better providing any type of messaging for cross contract calls (use cases are not yet determined)
5. It seems that more developers are developing version 1.0
On the contrary, cosmos has the following advantages over Polkadot:
1. Cosmos has more customization for specific projects (such as coin security);
2. The malicious verifier of the parachains chain in Polkadot network may expand its damage influence in the whole network, while cosmos limits the damage impact to a zone chain & corresponding assets.
3. Cosmos focuses on making asset transfers easier and easier, and its use cases have now been proven.
4. Cosmos is running. Polkadot hasn't.
5. Polkadot's parachain membership is limited and may be very expensive
6. Cosmos SDK has been used by many projects
There is a basic judgment in this, that is, the scale of the blockchain project is still very small, despite the existence of
There are many implementation methods, but cosmos and Polkadot can implement these application scenarios conveniently.
I know there is a difference between cosmic and polkadat.