Advantages and Disadvantages of Blockchain Mainnet

The Blockchain ecosystem is growing at a giant step. We no longer only find the typical Blockchain platforms of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, etc. With the large-scale demand for specific solutions for mass use cases, the ecosystem is expanding its ability to meet these demands, which cannot be tied to a single platform.

Given the relevance of the Blockchain ecosystem within the different sectors, it is important to consider which main blockchains present their mainnet for the benefit of product developments and decentralized applications for users in general. Let’s see the merits of some of the most important mainnets within the Blockchain ecosystem.

Ethereum

There is no other way to start this post without the king of altcoins. Despite the typical scalability issues plaguing the Ethereum Blockchain (gas fees and low TPS), its progress in developing its new ETH 2.0 mainnet is undoubtedly one of the most promising milestones within the Blockchain ecosystem in recent years.

Currently Ethereum mainnet is better suited for storing long-term static data that needs to be widely available, such as information from the Ethereum Registration Authority.

However, Ethereum is designed to be low-cost, open, flexible, and suitable for multi-party cooperation. Its architecture has unique layers that strengthen and create new possibilities for commercial systems.

Some worth highlighting merits of Ethereum over other permissionless public blockchains are:

• Security / Immutability
• Potential for interoperability with other applications, one of the big reasons why almost the entire DeFi industry relies on this mainnet.
• Reliability / availability (always active and persistent)
• Decentralization
• Size and diversity of the ecosystem

Despite its great benefits that allow it to be the second largest Blockchain network behind Bitcoin, Ethereum presents some challenges yet to be solved that present their disadvantages compared to other mainnets, as highlighted by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in a report from July 2020:

• Variability / Unpredictable transaction costs (gas fees) that makes it counterproductive at this time for deploy dApps
• Scalability
• Transaction Latency
• Possible Forks
• Difficulty of holding / using ETH to pay for transactions
• Privacy, leaking of sensitive data
• Chain reorgs impacting anchor transactions
• Data locality
• The “noisy neighbors” problem

Binance Smart Chain (BSC)

Delivered in September 2020, the Binance Chain team worked hard to get their mainnet operational after delivering the first trailer in April of last year.

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) incorporates smart contract functionalities that put it in direct competition with Ethereum. It brings interoperability and the programming capacity of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in Binance Chain as one of its great strengths.

For those of you who don’t know, BSC has been created to run in parallel to Binance Chain. The main objective of BSC is the creation of Smart Contracts for tokens on the Binance Blockchain.

In summary, let’s recall the main attributes that were initially announced for Binance Smart Chain:

• Compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
• Proof of Stake Authority consensus which is a variant of Proof of Stake
• Environmentally friendly compared to Ethereum (PoW)
• Block time is approximately 3 seconds which is much faster than Ethereum’s 13 seconds
• Cross-chain communications and transactions
• Super low transaction fees — As low as 1 cent!
• High performance

Despite the great benefits highlighted by the Binance team for BSC, some of the disadvantages around its mainnet are that:

• It suffers from high centralization: only 21 validator nodes on average, which endangers the security of the network and all the applications developed there
• It is little autonomy for users through the use of non-custodial purses
• It is complicated to become a node operator and validator

Polkadot

Polkadot is an open-source blockchain network designed to allow multiple separate blockchains to be turned into application-specific interconnected substrings called parachain.

Each chain built within Polkadot uses Parity Technologies’ modular Substrate framework, which allows developers to select specific components that are best suited to their specific application chain. The Polkadot network is the totality of all parachains connected to a single base platform known as the Relay Chain.

The network aims to offer scalability, upgradability, transparent governance, and cross-chain compatibility advantages over other projects. Let’s see some of its advantages:

• Parity Technologies’ modular Substrate framework gives developers the flexibility to select the specific components that best suit their specific application chain
• Polkadot enables developers to launch chains and applications leveraging a shared security model, without having to worry about attracting enough miners or validators to secure their own chains
• Polkadot parachains can use bridges to connect to external networks

Among its disadvantages of its mainnet we find:

• Polkadot is competing with many other mainnet, smart contracting, proof-of-stake blockchains such as Tezos, Cosmos, and Cardano, to name a few, with industry leaders Ethereum as they display entrenched network effects
• Hackers have exploited vulnerabilities in the code twice, spending millions of dollars before being stopped
• There is a limited number of parachains available and the slots are sold through auction, which may cost some smaller use cases

FLETA

In November 2019, FLETA officially launched its main blockchain network after several months of testing, under its own proposed technology with a developed mining consensus called Proof of Formulation (PoF).

FLETA bases its core technologies such as block redesign, independent multi-chain structure, proof-of-formulation, etc., to successfully carry out its mainnet, achieving up to 14,000 TPS in simulated real-world environments, making them one of the fastest in the world. Among its great advantages we find:

• FLETA has unlimited scalability, high transaction speeds
• Very low transaction fees, just pennies on the dollar per transaction
• High usability and performance for the use of applications in specific fields such as AI, medicine and gaming, among others
• Optimal performance for data management
• EVM support for fast, low-cost migrations
• Development of its FLETA Gateway system that allows the exchange of tokens for coins and vice versa without restrictions between different blockchains
• Interoperability between chains as DApp projects can use their original ERC-20 tokens while using the FLETA chain
• FLETA mainnet supports ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards, opening the door for the development of dApps in the DeFi sector

Among the main disadvantages we have:

• Little autonomy for users through the use of non-custodial purses
• Lack of an SDK for use by developers who wish to migrate to FLETA mainnet from other chains

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About FLETA

FLETA is a blockchain platform that aims to offer infrastructure that can be applied to real-world business models. FLETA has its own core blockchain technologies like Level Tree Validation, Parallel Sharding, Independent multi-chain Structure, Block Redesign, and PoF(Proof-of-Formulation) which is its own consensus algorithm. With them, it aims to solve the problems that existing platforms have such as slow speeds, scalability limitations and excessive fees, and provide a flexible development environment. Moreover, its Gateway technology improved its interoperability by allowing projects issuing their tokens through other mainnets to maintain their mainnets while using the FLETA chain.

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