EOS vs Ethereum - Clash of the Titans

Recently, Dan Larimer along with the eos.io team, announced the development of EOS, a consensus blockchain operating system that provides databases, account permissions, scheduling, authentication, and internet-application communication to app developers.

Since the launch of EOS token, the comparisons are being drawn between EOS and Ethereum. EOS and Ethereum are both decentralized smart contract platforms that enable users to develop decentralized applications (dapps).

Ethereum is currently by far the largest and most successful platform for decentralized applications, but not without its fair share of limitations. Vitalik buterin recently accepted in a post made on Reddit’s Ethereum trading community that “Ethereum’s scalability sucks; the blockchain design fundamentally relies on bottlenecks where individual nodes must process every single transaction in the entire network”.

Though, there are many differences in EOS and Ethereum with respect to design and vision, let’s look at some of them:

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EOS recognizes that many different applications require the same types of functionalities and seeks to provide those functions, such as implementations of the cryptography and app/blockchain communication tools needed by many applications. It provides a complete package as a blockchain, to let a developer focus solely on application development. For an example, assume if every mobile manufacturer had to create an operating system such as android or IOS, the number of mobile manufacturers would have been drastically low.

Mechanism and Governance:

One issue with the current Proof-of-Work implementation behind the Ethereum network is the difficulty in fixing broken applications. Recently the DAO suffered a critical bug/hack/failure, leading to a network split in blockchain (ETC).

What if there is another situation where a buggy contract results in the loss of millions of dollars. Will Vitalik Buterin and the leaders of the Ethereum community do another hard fork and will that result in another network split where you end up with Ethereum Classic Two or something along those lines?

Also, a buggy smart contract led to a loss of over $10 million worth of ether for QuadrigaCX, which is a cryptocurrency exchange in Canada. Therefore, a buggy smart contract on Ethereum will most certainly lead to either investor’s loss or a hard fork that will disrupt the entire network.

EOS can freeze and fix, broken or frozen applications. If there’s a bug in your application — then community can freeze it and then deploy a fix without disrupting the entire network. In short, a hard fork in EOS will be handled as a regular thing.

Scalability – A Game Changer?

In Dan’s EOS presentation at Consensus 2017, he highlighted the number of transactions per second of a few consumer services. For mass adoption of blockchain technology, scalability is of utmost importance.

In Ethereum, early test networks achieved 25 transactions per second (in somewhat optimized conditions), which could likely be increased to 50 or 100 tx/s with optimizations. This is nowhere near to the required transaction speed to run big decentralized applications such as financial institutions and social networks.

Vitalik Buterin has laid out a roadmap to "unlimited scalability" which heavily relies on the concept of sharding, within two years timeframe.

Sharding is a concept of breaking the database down into smaller chunks called “shards” and spreading those across a number of distributed servers.

Though doubtful due to complex technical limitations, if it turns out well, Ethereum can be expected to continue to enjoy the advantage of being first mover in blockchain smart contracts.

EOS will use vertical and horizontal scaling to make possible blockchain scalability to potentially millions of transactions per second. It will rely on a proven technology called Graphene, which has been shown in stress tests to achieve 10,000-100,000 transactions per second. Through vertical and horizontal scaling, it is likely to go up to millions of transactions per second.

Conclusion:

Do we have a winner here? Not right now!

I believe that both are great technologies and can co-exist together (e.g. Windows and Mac). However, EOS will have an advantage of building a blockchain from scratch with the required mechanism for commercial level decentralized applications. This post is little biased towards EOS, as every post has a tint of author’s perception and belief.

Note: I do not own any EOS or Ethereum tokens, and the information in this article should not be considered as an investment advice.

References:

http://www.eos.io
http://www.ethereum.org
EOS - Ethereum killer?
EOS.IO Technical White Paper