FLETA in Comparison to other Smart Contract Platforms

Published in

MEVerse

5 min readFeb 19, 2019

Smart contract platforms such as Ethereum, EOS, and many more have opened up opportunities for developers all around the world.

Decentralized applications (DApps) have great potential for extensive industry-disrupting capabilities. Currently, there is a race among top smart contract platforms in providing an ideal environment where DApps can take off.

FLETA is striving in this race to become the Google Android and Apple iOS of the blockchain market. To see how FLETA measures up, let’s look at a comparison between two heavy hitters in this same space: Ethereum and EOS.

Ethereum

Bitcoin was truly disruptive as a decentralized P2P financial system, however, people wondered whether blockchain technology had more in store. Vitalik Buterin answered by creating the world’s first smart contract platform in Ethereum.

Key Points

To understand the core philosophy behind Ethereum there are two aspects to consider:

Ethereum’s “gas” model
Ethereum’s consensus algorithm.

Gas Model

In Ethereum, smart contracts are executed under the “gas model”. You can think of Ethereum as a global, decentralized supercomputer renting out computational power to others to run smart contracts hosted on the supercomputer. This “computational power” is called gas and each execution step of a smart contract requires a certain amount of gas to be spent.

Consensus Mechanism

Ethereum currently uses the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm.

Under PoW miners add blocks by using their computational resources to solve hard cryptographic puzzles. While PoW is secure, the problem lies in it being extremely wasteful of computational power and energy, both valuable resources.

This is why Ethereum plans to move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) as PoS will replace block miners with block validators where validators stake tokens, and when new blocks are added, validators are provided with a proportion of rewards relative to their staked token amounts.

Ethereum’s version of PoS is the Casper protocol that works similar to standard PoS algorithms yet differs in its punishment mechanism; any validator attempting to act maliciously will have their stakes slashed and taken away.

Limitations of Ethereum

There are three problems that Ethereum currently faces:

Ethereum is not scalable and can only manage 15–20 transactions per second currently.
Gas costs can get very high. Developers don’t need to pay the majority of these fees directly however users are required to bear the costs as they interact with the DApps to send transactions. This clearly isn’t ideal for users.
Finally, it is not yet known how Ethereum will perform once they transition to PoS. Ethereum has been a PoW chain for years and making this jump is not going to be without obstacles, especially as their mainnet is already live and running.

EOS

EOS came about as an answer to scalable smart contracts and the man behind EOS is Dan Larimer, the creator of Steem and BitShares.

Key Points

There are also two key points to understanding the philosophy behind EOS:

Ownership Model
Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS).

Ownership Model

While Ethereum rents out resources, under EOS, users own resources.

By staking and locking up EOS tokens, you are provided an equivalent amount of resources in network and CPU bandwidth in return. To obtain RAM however, this needs to be purchased from an in-built RAM marketplace. By buying and using these resources, developers are then able to create decentralized applications.

DPoS Consensus

Delegated proof-of-stake works the same as normal PoS with one small caveat. While the entire network takes place in the PoS protocol, under DPoS, only 21 block producers are elected by the community.

These 21 block producers are put in charge of consensus for the entire ecosystem. Since only 21 nodes decide on consensus — as opposed to the whole network — this means consensus is significantly faster, however this does introduce greater centralization.

Limitations of EOS

Limitations of EOS are as follows:

With EOS there are high upfront costs for developers. Not only do developers have to lock up and stake tokens to gain bandwidth resources, they are also required to buy RAM for user accounts from the marketplace.
Decentralization is sacrificed for speed. Since only 21 block producers are in charge of consensus, the system becomes more centralized and vulnerable to potential corruption and attacks.

How does FLETA differ?

FLETA provides developers with a blockchain platform that is far more flexible and affordable than Ethereum and EOS. The main differential points are:

A fast and secure consensus algorithm.
Developer friendly ecosystem.

Proof-of-Formulation

Under Proof-of-Formulation (PoF), instead of miners and validators, there are two groups of actors involved in block creation and transaction confirmation:

Formulators: block generators
Observers: Witnesses of block creation and security for the network.

Formulators work in groups of 20 and are subdivided based on rank (#1 to #20):

Block generator is the first ranked formulator
Synchronization group are formulators ranked 2nd to 10th
Stand by group and observers are ranks 11 to 20.

Why PoF is faster and more secure is because consensus on blocks and transactions are divided and delegated between different Formulator groups, as they work simultaneously in a parallel sharded fashion for faster transaction processing.

Furthermore, because of the multi-chain design of FLETA’s blockchain system and PoF, double spending is not possible.

Developer Friendly Ecosystem

FLETA produces a much cheaper and flexible platform for developers for DApp creation as:

Developers can choose whether they wish to utilize FLETA’s technological services. If they decide to do so, the costs incurred will only depend on usage.
Developers on the FLETA platform launch their DApps on their own independent subchain, where they have complete discretion on their own unique token economies, consensus algorithm, and transaction fees (or lack thereof).