NEM vs Ethereum: why do we migrate of Blockchain in Tutellus?
BOOOM! We’ve been wanting to announce this for some time. We bet on NEM (and we leave Ethereum) as the main Blockchain for deploy Tutellus.io. We tell you in a post quite dense from a technical point of view, do not give up. And of course, We bring our personal vision from within the industry and Tutellus. We do not attack anyone and less Ethereum, we still loving it :)
Ethereum is a very powerful and interesting blockchain as you know. The ability to develop smart contracts and the community around ERC20 compatibility make it especially sexy; However, during this time we have found many limitations for Tutellus.io, which we are gonna explain (if there are limitations to our project does not mean that there should be limitations for others; It will depend on their tokenomics).
1. Working on Ethereum is expensive.
Although in February Ethereum prices have dropped, to consolidate transactions have impossible fees if you want to run many events per user and unit of time; This causes you to have to do quick fixes in the design of your model; In our case, we only consolidate STUT tokens at the end of the course, saving (we) any intermediate consolidation. As somebody says, “causing working on ETH forces you to centralize many things, decentralization is overrated.”
2. Working on Ethereum is slow.
Although there are intermediate mechanisms that allow-again-quick fixes, the reality is other quite different: Ethereum executes up to 20 transactions per second (in front of the 3 of Bitcoin or 1,700 of VISA, for example). The more use of the network and the current consensus algorithms (PoW-based), the more queues will be produced and no improvement is expected. This produces that a transaction on ETH takes up to several minutes to consolidate, or some hours if you keep a very small Gwei.
3. ERC20 compatibility is overrated.
Even at the risk of receiving campions to say this we can assert it. After several months traveling and talking with crypto projects around the world we confirm (our statement is based just on our experience) that we have not found almost any token that speak to each other and generate associated value, beyond the cases we all know (Cryptokitties and little else).
What We mean is that putting as a basic premise in selecting a Blockchain this argument We think is a mistake. Like big companies as RSK are solving smartcontracts’s execution on Blockchains without this functionality (such as Bitcoin), other projects will emerge that apply an additional tunneled layer so that ERC20 tokens interact with others that are not. And the matter is fixed.
Why are we loving NEM right now?
1. Huge community and Top Blockchain
NEM (New Economy Movement) or XEM (the token) is one of the most relevant projects by marketcap (3,5b right now). There is a very important community of developers worldwide and they have product in production with large companies like WeChat.
2. NEM es fast, very fast. And cheap!
The public NEM network is currently (begin 2018) able to run about 120 transactions per minute, which is in the same order of magnitude as the capacity of other public blockchain networks, such as Ethereum. With the new NEM version (“catapult”, available in permissioned environment since March 2018) tests in a private lab environment have proven NEM has a capacity of more than 4,000 tps. Therefore the capacity of the public NEM network can be expected to rise to a higher order of magnitude once catapult is deployed in the public NEM network.
3. You can develope internal blockchains with NEM connected to the MainNet
This functionality is super cool: We can consolidate n-thousand transactions per user in our own blockchain (zero cost of consolidation) and connect it to the main network only to send and consolidate certain information.
4. Governance: NEM’s consensus algorithm (Proof of Importance, POI) is closely aligned with the STUT token
The way that NEM has of prioritizing the relevance of the users (POI) is very similar to the one that we design for the STUT tokens (those who measure the relevance of the users). Therefore, both projects are much aligned as for the importance of the users and the mechanisms of established gobernance.
5. NEM has a APIcentric model, like Tutellus
A very technical and also important aspect: both Tutellus and NEM technology are based on APIs. The compatibility of both is absolute and its integration, fast.
6. NEM has a very nice JS library
Anyone who have programmed smartcontracts with Solidity knows it stinks. The report of Solidity’s errors, for example, is more than unfortunate. Using Javascript is a brutal step forward, and doing so on a well — structured library — as is the case of NEM, will be thankful.
7. NEM Foundation is very cool!
From the Tutellus team we have been lucky to meet different people from the foundation, from founders to developers, and it must be said that they are amazing nice people and predisposed to help and grow the community.
But again, top respect for Ethereum: thanks to this network cryptoEconomy is entering in the mainstream. An excellent blockchain very well adapted to a lot of projects and with the biggest ecosystem.
For all this things and after many tests (in local and production) we have decided to build the first educational dAPP on NEM, and one of the first in the world — on a large scale — on this Blockchain. We will work very hard together with the foundation and the ecosystem of developers to build a product with worldwide impact.
PD: we know we need a new logo, but the important has priority :)
Go on!
