Who’s Afraid of Ethereum? The Top 12 Smart Contract Platforms

Smart contract platforms now allow anyone to design programmable finance and apply them to a myriad of new use cases. For example, the decentralized finance (DeFi) movement, as well as other decentralized applications (dApps), are all dominated by Ethereum-based smart contracts. 

One can think of smart contracts as dynamic “if-then” statements. 

And if a developer or company combines enough of them together, they can build never-before-seen tools. The advantages aren’t just in this flexibility, either. Smart contracts eliminate many of the costs of intermediaries traditionally included in the fields of law, finance, supply chains, and much more.

Ethereum now has a host of competitors too. Though the project has enjoyed a first-mover advantage, faster, more advanced blockchain projects have emerged to try taking the throne. 

In the following Guide, Crypto Briefing outlines the top smart contract platforms and offers readers a broad overview of the smart contract space. 

Founder: Vitalik Buterin

Date of creation: Launched in July 2015.

Asset: ETH

One-liner: The first smart contract platform, and still the biggest in terms of developer activity.

Ethereum was the first blockchain to be developed with a Turing-complete scripting language, Solidity. It was the brainchild of programmer Vitalik Buterin, who recognized the vast potential of blockchain technology through his early engagement with Bitcoin. However, after failing to convince Bitcoin core developers that the platform needed application development functionality, he wrote the white paper for Ethereum. 

The founding team comprises Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, Amir Chetrit, Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin, and Jeffrey Wilke. Several of these members have since left Ethereum to work on their own projects. 

Ethereum is the current leader of smart contract space and provided a blueprint for many of its successors. It was the first blockchain to gain any significant traction with enterprise adoption, thanks in part to the formation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which boasts members including Samsung, Intel, and JP Morgan. 

Ethereum is also the central hub of the decentralized finance movement, home to some of crypto’s biggest dApps, including Maker and Compound. 

Over the years, Ethereum has weathered several significant events, the most notable of which is The DAO incident in 2016, where a hacker exploited a vulnerability in a smart contract and stole $50 million worth of ETH. 

The fallout from the incident resulted in a divide in the Ethereum community, with one side supporting a rollback of the blockchain to reclaim the funds, and the other side declaring that “code is law.” A controversial hard fork ensued, resulting in the formation of the Ethereum Classic blockchain. 

The biggest challenge facing Ethereum, however, has been its lack of scalability. Despite being one of the most-used blockchains, it frequently suffers from network congestion. Perhaps due to a highly decentralized approach to core development, upgrades are slow to arrive and often beset by delays. 

The current upgrade, dubbed ETH 2.0, has been slated for the first phase of implementation in July 2020. 

The native token of the platform is ether (ETH), which is the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. Ether is also used to pay the gas fees required for transactions on the platform. 

Founder: Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar (now CEO of IOV Labs), Sergio Lerner, Gabriel Kurman, Adrian Eidelman, and Ruben Altman

Date of creation: RSK was founded in 2016 and launched in 2018.

Asset: RBTC, RIF

One-liner: Smart contract platform running as a sidechain of the Bitcoin blockchain.

RSK operates as a sidechain of the Bitcoin blockchain and is merge-mined with Bitcoin. It was developed to bring Ethereum-like smart contract functionality to the Bitcoin network. 

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, CEO and founder, describes the RSK vision to Crypto Briefing as: 

“We developed RSK to add value and expand functionality to the Bitcoin ecosystem by providing smart contracts functionality and greater scalability, establishing the layer needed for Bitcoin to  become the financial system of the future.”

The RBTC token is pegged 1:1 with Bitcoin and is the native token of the RSK platform, used to pay for the gas to execute transactions. 

RSK now operates as part of a technology stack with the Bitcoin network as a base layer. The RSK Infrastructure Framework (RIF) layer runs on top of RSK, providing a marketplace of developer tools. These include storage, payments, and a naming service. 

RSK hasn’t gained the same traction as Ethereum in the North American and European markets. However, it does have a far bigger footprint in its native Latin America. 

The company that operates RSK, IOV Labs, last year acquired Taringa, the biggest social network in Latin America with over 30 million users. It’s also the platform of choice for Money on Chain, which operates the Dollar on Chain stablecoin and has recently expanded into offering stablecoins collateralized by the RIF token.