ICON vs TEZOS vs COSMOS — A network data analysis

Published in

Everstake

4 min readAug 28, 2020

It becomes increasingly harder to keep up with the flood of news and updates of all the different smart contract platforms that are currently active in the cryptocurrency market. There are probably hundreds of different blockchain infrastructure projects out there competing against each other.

Each one comes with a unique underlying tech, governance model and use case. Crypto communities tend to get caught up in their own bubble and are not aware of the progress that has been made by competitor chains.

Developers, investors and users are naturally attracted to blockchain platforms that are constantly being updated, bring along a successful native token and possess a proper user base. Nobody wants to invest in, use or build on top of a “dead chain”.

That’s why it is essential to do proper research before getting involved in any kind of way and make sure that certain network metrics and numbers are rising and not declining.

In this article I will compare ICON with two other delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) blockchain protocols. The analysis will be based on pure metrics and network data.

I also want to leave the comparison completely unbiased, so I won’t be commenting on the numbers or say whether I find them significant or not. Everyone can build his/her own opinion about it and at the end draw a conclusion. I also won’t take partnerships, fungibility or technological achievements into consideration, just bare figures and raw data.

For the comparison I picked Cosmos and Tezos since they are both very exciting and successful blockchain projects. Both of them are smart contract platforms and are aiming to enrich the DAPP ecosystem by bringing in as many developers as possible.

In order to visualize and put the gathered data in a more comparable perspective I will create Pie Charts for each metric that provides sufficient and valid data.

A quick introduction

Cosmos

Cosmos is called the Internet of Blockchains, which allows you to build whole blockchain ecosystems on top of it. Cosmos SDK-based blockchains can incorporate the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol to communicate with other compatible blockchains.

Tezos

The Tezos platform aims to combine a self-correcting protocol and on-chain governance to manage network modifications, and supports Turing complete smart contracts.

ICON

ICONs vision is building a digital nation known as the ICON Republic, which aims to “hyperconnect the world”. With its interoperability protocol BTP it will be possible to share and seamlessly transact value and information across its network from both, public to private and also other blockchain protocols.