We’re in the business of smart contracts. So we’ve always been grateful to the man who put them at the heart of blockchain: Vitalik Buterin. In 2015, he co-founded Ethereum, the motor that powers eTrustable’s smart contracts.
What’s not to love?
We love Ethereum for many reasons. There are far too many exciting capabilities to cover here, but below are some of our favourite Ethereum killer features:
The original smart contracts: Sure, Nick Szabo was the first to coin the term. True, Bitcoin already featured some very limited smart contracts. But, Ethereum was built specifically to take blockchain beyond crypto to power smart contracts. Vitalik is, as far as we’re concerned, the father of these potentially world-changing little lines of code.
Innovation: Ethereum’s creator has never been afraid to innovate. His switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake is just one example. We want to be with the platform that dreams big and dares to evolve.
Community Service: according to Blockgeeks, Ethereum boasts “one of the healthiest developer communities in the crypto space.”
Don’t take it from us: more than 50% of the billion-dollar firms included in Forbes are building applications on top of Ethereum or deriving platforms from it.
Of course, every technology, especially such a young one, has its shortcomings.
Scalability is Ethereum’s great limitation. Or at least, it was…
Most experts have, by and large, agreed on the huge potential of Ethereum. But a criticism levelled against this platform is one common to all of them. And, most importantly, it’s one that Ethereum has recently moved beyond in dramatic fashion. The issue is scalability, a blockchain buzzword and traditionally the main pitfall of this technology.
The world of blockchain is a fast-moving one. This very useful article about different blockchain platforms (well worth a read for a good overview) was written just three months ago. But Ethereum has already taken a quantum leap forward since its publication. The article states:
“While Ethereum paved the way for smart contract platforms, the fact remains that it’s a very slow platform. Because of its design, it can only manage 15-20 transactions per second. A platform with such high latency cannot support modern dapps. It’s like playing a modern game like GTA 5 in your Windows 98 computer.”
This was true. Indeed, many people continue to believe it to be the case. But while everyone in Blockchain has been talking about scalability issues, its greatest minds have been scrambling to come up with solutions. Since Ethereum’s creation, many updates have taken place.
A fork in the road
The latest, the Istanbul Hard Fork, has brought with it myriad improvements to the platform. Most important for our context has been the huge improvement to scalability.
The paltry 15-20 transactions per second mentioned in the quote above are a thing of the past. This article is one of many that talks about the vast leaps Ethereum has made:
“Sharding in combination with Plasma will be able to increase the scalability of the network by, according to Buterin, one million transactions per second. In comparison, Visa and Mastercard … can handle about 2000 TPS and PayPal handles 200 TPS. StarWare’s measures put Ethereum well ahead of these large payment processing companies.”
Blockchain is still a new technology. The possibilities are endless and nothing is certain. We agree with Blockgeeks when they say “smart contracts may end up becoming one of the most important inventions of all time.”
Every time another issue (privacy, sustainability and of course, scalability) is improved, we are more and more convinced. We firmly believe that of all the platforms currently out there, Ethereum is the most innovative and reliable.
Smart contracts are the tools of our trade. And we know that the founding fathers still lead the way.
