The Pros and Cons of Flow and Etherum

We have many clients come to us unsure of which blockchain to implement for their project. With an array of blockchains in existence, how should you weigh the pros and cons of which blockchain might be best for your project?

Should you use Ethereum? Flow? Solana? Aptos?

This post weighs the pros and cons of building on Ethereum and Flow blockchains.

Cons of the Flow blockchain

• Updates to the native language Cadence: The programming language of the Flow blockchain is Cadence. The Flow team often pushes updates to the testnet and mainnet that break smart contracts. As a result, Flow requires continuous maintenance of smart contract transactions and scripts. Link: Breaking changes coming with Secure Cadence release! For the time being, building on Flow means that projects need a Flow engineer to maintain your contracts over time.
• Flow is harder to implement than Ethereum: Flow is a newer blockchain and it is less widely adopted compared to Ethereum. It is harder to find talented Cadence developers than it is to find talented Solidity developers. When you do find talented Cadence developers, they are more expensive than Solidity developers due to their scarcity.
• Tooling: There is not as much developer tooling on Flow as there is on Ethereum. Therefore, developing on Flow is more work than developing on Ethereum.
• Flow Wallet: The Flow wallet acts so that Dapper is not a financial institution. Flow Wallet does not allow for auctions. NFTs cannot be auctioned off on the Flow blockchain.
• Flow tokens cannot be displayed and are not transferable to many other marketplaces. Flow tokens are available on local project marketplaces like NFL All Day and NBA Top Shot. The only third party marketplace that lists Flow tokens is OpenSea.

Pros of the Flow blockchain

• Flow has setup a $725m ecosystem fund as a catalyst for growth: https://flow.com/ecosystemsupport DapperLabs, the creators of the Flow blockchain, are willing to invest in new projects on Flow. DapperLabs will offer funds to projects for development, marketing, etc
• Network effects: Flow is trusted and has name recognition with the big brands (NFL, NBA, etc).
• Sports: Because of DapperLab’s relationships with the NFL, NBA, UFC and La Liga, Flow has become known as the blockchain for sports. If you are looking to build a sports project, it might make sense to launch on the Flow blockchain because of the blockchain’s network effects with the sports industry.
• Wallet: Flow wallets are designed for easy adoption and onboarding to web3. There are no seed phrases. When a user creates an account, a wallet and ramping options are created for them.
• Blockchain Technology: Flow’s infrastructure was built with Ethereum’s limitations in mind. The blockchain uses proof-of-stake (PoS), is environmentally friendly and uses specialized nodes (ACID) to mitigate the scalability trilemma.

Cons of the Ethereum Blockchain

• There are a lot of “shit coins” on Ethereum: As a widely adopted blockchain there are a lot of crap tokens and projects on the Ethereum blockchain. This can make it harder for your project to stand out on Ethereum. Collectors or investors may also be more hesitant when investing to protect themselves from losses or scams on the blockchain.
• High gas fees: Like any blockchain, Ethereum can only handle a given number of transactions in a given time span. The Ethereum mainnet suffers from low transaction speed. The blockchain cannot handle the volume of transactions it experiences. As traffic on the network grows, users spend Eth to assure that their transaction is prioritized. This is often referred to as paying gas. This can make transacting on Ethereum very expensive. The user experience of decentralized applications (dapps) deteriorates if transactions are expensive to verify or cannot be verified.
• Sharding: Some people do not see sharding as a solution to Ethereum’s scalability issue.
• Adoptance can be hard for normies: For those who are not familiar with blockchain, the need to set up a wallet and purchase Ether, etc to navigate through the blockchain can be hard.
• Forks: The possibility of forking without a consensus can generate instability and disagreements.

Pros of the Ethereum Blockchain

• Widely adopted: There are over 630,000 ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
• There is an abundance of Solidity developers: Projects and developers have taken to the Ethereum blockchain because of the blockchain’s standards and widespread adoption.
• Solidity developers are cheap: Because of the wide scale adoption, Solidity developers are easy to find and far less pricey than Flow developer.
• Widely adopted standards: ERC1155, ERC721, ERC20s, etc
• Access to L2s: Ethereum leverages Layer 2 blockchain technology to increase speed and lower transaction costs. For more information on layer 2 read our article here.

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