The criticism of Ethereum’s scalability has hindered the development of Ethereum. For this reason, Ethereum proposed ETH2.0 to upgrade. However, judging from the current project progress, the project has not progressed as fast as the Polkadot project, even if Ethereum The successful launch of 2.0 may not be as good as Polkadot’s technology. Because the Polkadot concept is more advanced, the concept of Ethereum 2.0 is obviously insufficient.
In 2016, after Ethereum’s first CTO and co-founder Gavin Wood left Ethereum, he wrote the Polkadot white paper “Polkadot: The Vision of a Heterogeneous Multi-chain Framework”. The new blockchain was named Polkadot by Jarvan, and the first iteration was launched in May of this year. Recently, the Polkadot mainnet has undergone a series of major upgrades.
In 2015, when Jarvan started to develop Polkadot, the Ethereum core development team had already started the upgrade of ETH2.0, which was the largest infrastructure upgrade in the history of Ethereum. ETH2.0 is also known as Serenity. The first version, Serenity Phase 0, will be launched in 2020. The remaining three phases are planned to be launched in the next two years. The sharding architecture introduced by ETH2.0 may end the scalability problem that has been criticized since the 2017 ICO boom.
So, is the same blockchain infrastructure and has a deep historical origin, is Ethereum and Polkadot comparable? If so, what aspects should we compare from?
1. Sharding and scalability (Scalability with sharding)
Both ETH2.0 and Polkadot use sharding to achieve scalability. Sharding refers to partitioning the blockchain network or its data to achieve parallelism and increase throughput. However, sharding is a very broad concept. In fact, ETH2.0 and Polkadot use completely different architectures.
Currently, ETH1.0 runs on a single-chain structure, and each node must verify each transaction. In contrast, ETH2.0 has a main chain called the beacon chain, which facilitates communication between shards, and these shards are connected to the beacon chain for communication. Due to the nature of sharding parallel processing, ETH2.0 has a higher throughput than ETH1.0.
The ETH2.0 architecture has unified management of the shards on the beacon chain. The shards must change the state according to a unified method, and then each block is added to the blockchain of the beacon chain. In essence, the beacon chain is a collection of a series of ports. We take the USB interface as an example. Only when the shape of the USB plug is correct, can it be connected correctly, and the fragments must also comply with the rules of ETH2.0 to link with the beacon chain.
Polkadot uses a completely different architecture, namely the relay chain + parachain architecture. The relay chain is the main chain, and the status of the parachain is similar to the sharding of ETH2.0. But unlike ETH2.0, when the parachain is connected to the main chain, Polkadot uses a more flexible meta-protocol. In other words, any parachain can be changed using more “personalized” and in line with the rules of the chain. status. The only thing that needs to be observed is that the relay chain validators (Validators) can use the meta-protocol to perform the verification process. The standard used in this process is WebAssembly, the Ewasm virtual machine.
2. Interoperability
Polkadot’s flexibility at the architectural level will make its interoperability far better than ETH2.0, because only Ethereum-specific shards can become part of the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, a bridge is built on the Polkadot architecture, which allows external blockchains to link to Polkadot, achieving two-way compatibility.
Regarding the role of the transit bridge, we illustrate, if ETH2.0 wants to communicate with Polkadot, it only needs to be connected to the transit bridge to communicate with any application on Polkadot. This transit bridge is just like you want to go. To travel in the United States, you need to obtain a visa at the embassy. Once the visa is approved, you can travel freely in the United States.
Ethereum is connected to the Polkadot ecosystem through a transfer bridge, which allows DApp developers to interact with any other Polkadot parachain. It can be understood that any DApp on Ethereum can interact with the Polkadot ecosystem as long as it is linked to the transfer bridge. Any application carries out information cross-chain. However, the opposite is impossible: Polkadot cannot be a shard of the Ethereum beacon chain. Take the transfer developed by Moonbeam as an example. The bridge provides developers with a smart contract platform built on Polkadot that is compatible with Ethereum.
Looking back at the ten-year history of blockchain development, so far, interoperability has never played an important role. But our blockchain world has evolved into isolated “walled gardens”-Bitcoin has a market value of 200 billion US dollars, which is a wonderful isolated garden, and Ethereum is 40 billion US dollars, which is a more beautiful isolated garden. How can we break these isolated walls? From this perspective, Polkadot’s strong interoperability will inevitably be the only protagonist in the blockchain world after 2020.
At the Blockstack Summit in San Francisco in 2019, Andreas Antonopoulos, a distributed system expert and a senior blockchain entrepreneur, presented a thought-provoking case on blockchain interoperability. He explained that the closed development of single-chain systems will suffer the consequences, and they all need infrastructure upgrades.
If Antonopoulos’s view is correct, many of the current infrastructures, such as Polkadot’s transit bridge and interoperability platform, may be the key driving force for the future development of Ethereum.
It is worth mentioning that Gavin Wood also agrees with the inherent symbiosis between Polkadot and Etereum. He said in a blog post that since the publication of the Polkadot white paper, “We know that we have established a bridge with the Ethereum ecosystem to help both parties expand their capabilities. , This will be one of the key points of the network.”
3. Development progress
Polkadot launched the first phase of the mainnet in May of this year. The project roadmap allows the fully decentralized infrastructure and pre-planned governance methods to be upgraded in stages. The first stage refers to the proof of PoA authorization stage. After this stage goes live, investors can exchange tokens from their Ethereum smart contracts. The second phase of the project was launched in July, namely the Nominated Proof of Stake Consensus (NPoS). Up to now, Polkadot has initiated important stages such as the network governance model and the use of balance transfers.
ETH2.0 uses a method different from phased implementation, that is, it is fully released after phased updates. The beacon chain is expected to be launched this summer, and PoS and full sharding will be carried out in the next phase.
4. Teams
Although the ETH2.0 project has some well-known names among blockchain developers, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin himself, ETH2.0 is not developed and implemented by a single team, but several teams are responsible for ETH2 .0 Various iterations of different clients to maintain network security.
In contrast, Polkadot was developed by a company called Parity Technologies, which is a global team of engineers, cryptographers, architects, and researchers. Parity developed its Parity Ethereum client and Parity Zcash client together with Polkadot.
Jutta Steiner, CEO of Parity Technologies
Parity Technologies was co-founded by Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner. Gavin Wood’s Ethereum high-level programming language Solidity developed when he founded Ethereum has earned Gavin a good reputation. In addition, applied mathematician Jutta Steiner is also a member of the founding team of Ethereum. He is the first security leader of the founding team of Ethereum. Now Jutta Steiner is the CEO of Parity Technologies.
5. Time is of the essence (Time is of the essence)
The biggest challenge facing ETH2.0 is the slow implementation of the project. Since 2017, people have begun to discuss the scalability of Ethereum. At present, without any delay, ETH2.0 is likely to be fully implemented. By 2022. However, the most critical advantage with Polkadot and all other blockchain projects is that Ethereum has the longest community base and the strongest developer base.
But from another perspective, the continuous delay of ETH2.0 has given ETH2.0’s biggest competitor, Polkadot’s biggest competitor, to develop its own platform to provide other attributes such as interoperability. Since Polkadot is fully compatible with Ethereum, this means that Ethereum developers can share the performance of Polkadot on the original platform.
Once the complete ETH2.0 is fully implemented, it will be interesting to work together on Polkadot and Ehtereum. If all goes well, the two platforms will have complementary advantages and eventually become a blockchain network with 1+1 greater than 2.
