Blockchain for Enterprises: Comparing Cosmos, EOS, Ethereum, Litecoin, Tron and XinFin
Blockchain. Or shall we say blockchains? After all, we have so many of these technically advanced distributed ledgers that are totally disrupting today’s industries.
Efficiency, immutability, security, and decentralization are some of the most effective and echoing words that come tagged to the blockchain technology. And, well, we cannot differ from the opinion that it truly deserves all of it.
However, did you by any chance notice that enterprises, especially the finance sector, are quite stubborn when it comes to not implementing blockchain? Why?
They find it difficult to understand which blockchain would suit them best. Actually, they’re pretty skeptical about most of the existing ones. Some are not scalable enough, some are too “open,” and, let’s agree on this one, some aren’t just a scam.
If you haven’t already guessed it, today we’re talking about a blockchain that can serve the enterprises best. And no, we’re not just going to force you to read tasteless facts; we’ll make an interesting comparison of five major blockchains and show how the sixth one stands better in most cases for the enterprise sector.
Ready? Let’s roll.
Here are the five plus one blockchains you’ll be reading about today:
- Cosmos
- EOS
- Ethereum
- Litecoin
- Tron
- XinFin
Undoubtedly, each of the above five blockchains has its own specialities, but when it comes to presenting a solution for the enterprises, they don’t make a match. How? Let’s see.
Special Abilities
Cosmos
Carrying out a transaction over the same blockchain, say, Tron, is quite an easy process. But if it is to be done between two different blockchains, there isn’t a straight way for that. To solve this problem, innovators created the Cosmos blockchain network. Cosmos is an ecosystem of necessary tools and equipment that can be used to build a blockchain. Every blockchain thus coded in the Cosmos ecosystem becomes interoperable.
EOS
The EOS blockchains primary goal is to completely negate the transaction fee system from the digital economy. Alongside this, the project is currently working to attain the highest transaction speed that the world has ever witnessed. It’s promised to be of the scale of millions.
Ethereum
Ethereum wears the crown of the classic blockchain that brought smart contracts to life. Smart contracts were first proposed in 1994 by an American computer scientist Nick Szabo, but it saw its first use when Vital Buterin created Ethereum. Smart contracts automated most of the transaction process and made it more trustworthy.
Litecoin
People often call it the second Bitcoin. It is so because of their completely concurrent characteristics. It is simply a peer-to-peer blockchain for the transfer of digital currencies in a secure manner, just like bitcoin. The only very clear difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin blockchains is that the latter is more scalable, i.e., it renders a much higher transaction speed than the Bitcoin blockchain.
Tron
Tron was created to be a peer-to-peer exchange platform for digital content creators and to help them connect directly with their consumers. Seemingly, Tron failed to keep its promise and its native currency TRX is now mostly used in the online gambling industry.
XinFin
Within the crowd of all the above permissionless/public blockchains, we’re finally talking about that one, hybrid blockchain. The XinFin blockchain. It is an enterprise-ready hybrid blockchain for global trade and finance. What makes XinFin stand above all the eminent blockchains previously mentioned is its alignment towards onboarding more and more of the enterprise sector over the blockchain.
It has been specifically designed keeping in mind the needs of what enterprises seek in blockchains. With the ability to function as both a private and a public blockchain, enterprises can easily determine what transaction data they would want to get stored publicly and what they would only want to share with a few trusted parties.
Technical Differences
Consensus Mechanism
The six blockchains we’re referring to in this article can be broadly classified into three parts in terms of the consensus mechanism they use — Tendermint-Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), Proof-of-Work (PoW), and Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS).
Cosmos, the network for parallel, interoperable blockchains, functions over the Tendermint-BFT consensus mechanism. BFT can only be used for a permissionless blockchain, but Tendermint Core allows for the creation of either a public or a private blockchain.
The proof-of-work consensus is deployed by the Litecoin and Ethereum network. It was the first consensus ever implemented on a blockchain, that is on the Bitcoin network. As the blockchain world soon realized, it isn’t scalable enough. And it’s energy deficient. It’s surely not what enterprises had been looking for.
Lastly, we have the delegated proof-of-stake mechanism, which is used by the Tron, EOS, and XinFin network. It rises up to the shortcomings of the PoW consensus, meaning that it’s both scalable and energy efficient. However, it is not as decentralized as the PoW consensus but surely decentralized enough to allow the blockchain using it to still fit the definition of a distributed ledger.
Scalability
According to theory, and what could be made possible in the near future, the number of transactions that a blockchain can handle each second (the scalability) is the highest for Cosmos network. It promises that millions of transactions could be made possible on the Cosmos network in the coming time. But for now, it delivers a maximum transaction speed of 1,000 per second.
Both Litecoin and Ethereum, owing to the PoW consensus they use, have their scalability on the lower end with Litecoin delivering a maximum of 56 transactions per second while the higher end for Ethereum is only 15.
The DPoS group of blockchains take the cake with their highest transaction speeds. Of all, EOS has so far gone the most extreme, settling 4,000 transactions in one second. Tron scales to half of that with 2,000 transactions per second to its name. On the sweet spot between Tron and EOS lies the XinFin network that has recorded a speed of almost 3,000 transactions in a second.
Block Creation Time
Block creation time, or simply block time is the time taken for the mining of one block on a blockchain. It mostly depends on two factors: the transaction speed of the blockchain and the number of transactions that are being executed.
While there’s no specific block time for any blockchain, it’s usually defined by an average value. For the six blockchains in discussion today, this average value varies between 0.5 seconds for EOS to 150 seconds for Litecoin.
Cosmos most often adds a new block to its network every six to seven seconds. ETH does the same in about 15 seconds while Tron takes only three.
Our blockchain in focus, the XinFin blockchain performs quite appreciably in terms of block time with an average of only 2 seconds for one block creation.
KYC for Masternodes
For an industrial sector that is so inclined towards not sharing its transaction data with anyone apart from the authorized parties, don’t you think it would be too brutal of the blockchain industry to just let their transactions be processed by unknown nodes?
This is why a KYC enabled Masternode feature is so crucial for a blockchain that can be used by enterprises.
One of the major reasons why XinFin is said to be tailored according to the need of enterprises is because it supports KYC for Masternodes. To justify the point even further, none of the above five blockchains we discussed provide this facility.
We hope that you now understand why we said we were to discuss five plus one blockchains rather than simply saying six blockchains.
Market Value
At the time of writing, Ethereum is the most widely used blockchain with the highest market cap. Each ETH is currently priced at $266.24 with the foundation sitting atop 28.35 billion. Litecoin sits beside Ethereum with a total market cap of $8.46 billion and each LTC token valued $136.00.
Next is the network with the most successful ICO in the history of blockchain. The EOS network. It is valued at $6.18 billion with each EOS token worth $6.73. Tron has a net worth of $2.19 billion and each TRX token costs $0.032871. Cosmos shares $1.183 billion worth of the total market valuation with its ATOM tokens valued $6.21.
Lastly, the recently launched XinFin network that is already disrupting the enterprise sector with blockchain technology holds a net worth of $2.29 million with each XDC token worth $0.000592.
Conclusion
Apart from market valuation, the XinFin blockchain stands shoulder to shoulder with all the “big guys” in the blockchain industry. Considering that it has its prime focus on the enterprise sector, it can be said that XinFin has the perfect set of features for it. Its flexibility is something that will undoubtedly place it above other permissionless/public blockchains for use in the enterprises.
