Summary And Comparison Of The Top 5 Blockchain Platforms
By Fabian Amino on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
Blockchain technology is as powerful as the internet itself.
Much ink has been spilled on the subject, with two battling schools of thoughts competing for the headlines — those who claim the technology has the potential to upend the banking, manufacturing, and voting sectors, to the naysayers who think the technology has absolutely zero chance of success.
By now, you must have already heard of the term blockchain — and with some little bit of digging, perhaps found out that it’s the driving force behind Bitcoin and a long list of the other cryptocurrencies you know.
You may have also found out that Blockchain is basically some sort of database and one that very smart financial people and techies have been struggling to crack up and refine. Meaning it’s just a matter of time before it completely alters the world’s financial systems.
And while you may be well familiar with the two leading blockchain platforms — Bitcoin and Ethereum, there exists other players in the blockchain world that are nearly as promising, and which offers something really groundbreaking.
Ethereum
Where you think of Bitcoin as the digital gold, think of Ethereum as the digital silver. While the platform operates a lot like Bitcoin — it has its own wallets and an almost similar Blockchain ecosystem, its technology is based on entirely different protocols that set it miles apart from the pioneering blockchain platform.
Created in mid-2015 by a college dropout by the name Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is ranked among the most developed blockchain platforms today. For this reason, it’s been widely adopted as the platform for making smart transaction contracts.
Suffice it to say it has multiple use cases in the industrial sector and a strong online support network that makes it just as powerful as Bitcoin or any other threatening Blockchain platform out there.
Read this keeping in mind that it was also the first Cryptocurrency in the world to be crowd-funded. And it was after the crowdfunding that the total number of Ether (Ethereum) to be produced was decided.
Hyperledger
The Hyperledger project was created with the sole aim of facilitating collaboration between developers, businesses, and the other players involved with Distributed Ledger Technology.
As it stands, an upward of 250 organizations are already supporting Hyperledger, with the number projected to shoot to thousands within the next few years.
Patronized by the Linux Foundation, the platform was first launched in 2016 with the key goal to create industry-specific applications and hardware systems that support individual business transactions.
They were to do this by offering open source, enterprise-grade ledger frameworks and code-bases that produce measurable business results.
R3 Corda
Created by a consortium of some of biggest banks and financial institutions in the world, Corda is considered one of the most sophisticated blockchain platforms, and which sets the ground for other enterprise blockchain applications to be implemented.
Corda isn’t just another random blockchain platform. As a matter of fact, some experts in the field of cryptocurrencies have long argued that it isn’t a blockchain platform at all. But the only one of its kind platform whose features stretch far beyond the proposed value of blockchain technologies.
Corda is simply a partner network that has thus far managed to pull together 60 companies. And even though it was meant to be focused on banking, the platform boasts a long list of other user cases in the line of trade finance, health care, supply chain and so forth.
Aergo
Aergo is a fourth-generation blockchain and which promises to bring the world even closer to blockchain adoption than ever. Basically, the platform is targeted at allowing businesses from all over the globe set up innovative applications by sharing their data on a trust-less and distributed technology ecosystem.
What the platform basically does is that it allows disparate side chains to communicate with each other using a permission-less public layer that allows for immutable data anchoring and trustless settlement.
It’s a broad blockchain platform that hosts crypto-centric decentralized applications and a long host of enterprise IT solutions. All this is done to provide developers with a compelling case for creating web applications, as well as a compelling case to enterprises for deploying a broad range of cloud solutions.
Quorum
Quorum is an Ethereum-based Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The platform operates a lot like Ethereum, but with a list of major differences. For instance, it offers a more beefed up contract and transaction privacy compared to Ethereum.
It also flaunts a better performance by sufficing an upward of 100 transactions per seconds, which is way higher than Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Ergo, Quorum is the most preferred blockchain platform for financial institutions including banks, and it’s all thanks to its consensus mechanism that facilitates quicker transactions.
The Takeaway
There goes a brief overview of the top blockchain platforms that we have reasons to believe can help you implement your next killer idea for blockchain startup or application. These platforms are among the most talked about blockchain platforms among startups, enterprise, SMEs, and the general world of techies and crypto enthusiasts.
