Okay, I haven’t seen a comparison between those platforms, so I will attempt to outline the benefits from a business perspective. Since I’m not a fully seasoned professional, I strongly encourage the community to add and correct it (in a business context). Let’s start the digging.
ICON:
- Interoperability. Has a structure for connecting heterogeneous blockchains operating in different domains
- Less counterparty risk. Less critical points of failure, since interoperability is a native property in icon. Prevents forgery and tampering when moving assets across blockchains. Usually, you would need to use relays and oracles but not with ICON as it seems. I see some similarities with Polkadot here, what is the difference guys?
- Delegated Proof of Contribution (dPoC) consensus mechanism. Now, this is a community-based PoS actually. They quantified the “community” part a bit more. ICONists delegate their stake to elected representatives. The general un-stake period is between 5-20 days to prevent attacks.
- Block validation = 2 seconds.
REWARDS.
- Representative (only top 100), usually 50k monthly
- Independent contributors (3rd Party App developers, community activists, educators…), usually 12.5k monthly
- DAPP contributors (only top 100), usually 12.5k monthly
- Normal users can delegate their stake to one of the nodes mentioned above. Usually, 2-12% monthly (based on total staked amount I guess).
- Penalties
- Representatives can get disqualified (major = banhammer) or penalized (minor = 6% of their delegated stake gets burned if their productivity drops below 85%)
- Price. Similar to ethereum, ICON uses a platform based native gas token called step. 1 ICON TOKEN (ICX) = 100.000.000 step. This fee can be changed and updated by the Representatives in the network (governance).
- Costs. You need “gas/step” for transactions, SC/DAPP, and transaction data.
- Customizable fees. By default, the user/customer pays the fees. But it can be changed and the owner can determine the fee structure (for example fee owner-user 50-50%, 23%-77%, 99%-1%, whatever).
- Icon encourages owners to pay the step fees by having them locked in the network in the form of ICX tokens which can be used for generating step. Those can be locked within a virtual step vault between 1-24 months, and the locked amount can be between 5-100k ICX. Trading/exchanging, once it’s in the vault, is not possible. Sounds complicated? Don’t quit just yet, there is a practical example:
- Deposited 10,000 ICX and signed for 1 month, receive 80,000,000,000 Virtual Step per month, which is equivalent to 8.00% of the deposit amount 10,000, which is 800 ICX.
- Deposited 10,000 ICX and signed for 24 months, receive 202,400,000,000 Virtual Step per month, which is equivalent to 20.24% of the deposit, or 2,024 ICX.
NODES.
- Peer nodes. Leaders. Representatives. Big Responsibility. They Produce and validate blocks. Can be Public or Community representatives. The block gets confirmed after 2/3 of them agree on the block. They can get disqualified or face penalties if unproductive (6% of their stake gets burned if their productivity has dropped below 85%).
- Citizen nodes. Synchronise blocks. They “answer” the queries from the users and relay transactions to the Peer nodes. They are like the generals reporting to the leaders, so that they can focus on consensus and not be bothered by operational stuff. If you’re trying to hack the network, you will probably fail at this point and not get higher to the hierarchy. Exchanges/Dapp operators are usually citizen nodes.
- Light citizens. Synchronise block headers. Not much info about them, but probably like simple soldiers in the network.
- Parallel Processing. Means faster transactions, but how fast, I do not know.
ORACLES.
- Band protocol is their partner. Smaller than Chainlink but much more advanced in terms of features. Comment if you disagree.
WAVES
- Simplicity. People can make their own tokens in 5 minutes. Just set the maximum supply, name the coin, enable/disable smart contracts and dapps, and BAM. You can ICO super fast with low costs within this platform as it seems…
- The focus of WAVES is to make custom tokens (also NFT’s).
- Consensus mechanism is Leased Proof of Stake (LPos). I will pretend I’m not annoyed by those PoS variations, but here you have it.
- Speed. Block generation time is 1 min. Block verification time is 2 seconds and can handle “hundreds of transactions” (Whitepaper). Well, significantly less than VISA’s 65k per second or Mastercards 5k per second.
- Block size. Is max 1mb.
- Transaction fee. 1 waves fixed (or 0.001 waves for NFT’s)
REWARDS.
- 6 waves fixed for Generating nodes. This can be changed by voting every 100k blocks (approx. 70 days)
- LPoS allows the token holders to lease their tokens to the Waves nodes and earn a percentage of the payout as a reward.
- Fair Proof of Stake (FPoS) is used to select a generating node to generate the next block. Whatever, I’m not going into details here.
NODES.
- 100 Waves (owned or leased) is the minimum requirement for block validation and rewards. The bigger the bag, the bigger the chance for a reward.
- 2 Node types: Generating and validating nodes. Meaning, they sign block headers and transactions
- Generating node. They generate AND validate blocks. They receive rewards.
- Validator nodes. They validate blocks. And they get a % of the rewards from leasing their stake to Generating nodes.
Leased tokens are locked and remain in the owner’s address (They are not transferred to the node, they just remain unspendable until the lease is canceled by the leader). Hence the term lease
ORACLES.
No exclusive partner. They mention 3 different types (more below). They use multiple oracles and ensure an “oracle consensus” to prevent monopoly and abuse. For example, getting information from ten oracles and only if the data of 6 out of 10 oracles coincide, it gets accepted.
- Software oracles. Handle data accessible on the web (temperature, costs of products and merchandise, flight or train delays,…). Basically data from an API for example.
- Hardware oracles. Track real-world objects with devices and sensors (video triggers some event on the blockchain for example). Issuing speeding tickets is what comes to my mind. If an event is detected, the oracle writes about it on the blockchain basically.
- Human oracles. Implies that the data is entered by a human being.
ETHEREUM 2.0
- Can you even compare the two to ethereum? It’s like comparing a blue whale with a goldfish.
- Inflation >1% yearly. Well, practically it’s a deflationary asset in the long term.
- PoS consensus. At the time of writing it’s still PoW mainly. Has some Risks. Lots of derivatives connected to it (the whole DeFi sector, accounting to 8% of the total market cap of ethereum Q4/2020). But who cares really, if eth gets rekt, everything gets rekt, including puppies.
- It’s used for PUBLIC blockains predominantly. Institutional money is here also. If you get rekt using ethereum as a building platform, nobody can blame you. But high customizability also adds complexity and a higher potential for bugs. Ethereum’s smart contracts/dapps are every hacker’s wet dream.
- probably the most complex for development and deployment in this comparison.
- if you build, make sure it’s other people’s money.
PRICE.
- gas fees no idea, but less than using PoW consensus.
NODES.
- you need to have 32eth
REWARDS.
- 15% to 2% yearly, regressing.
ORACLES.
- You can plug-and-play whatever you can connect.