Smart contracts can change the world—the future of web 3.0 depends on the success of smart contracts. Can you think of a world where transactions can be associated with trust? Finding it difficult to trust someone when it comes to your transactions? Are you skeptical about involving a third party in the process? Let’s decentralize— these ‘if this, then that’ conditioned smart contracts have the caliber to automate key tasks that stop all your never-ending trust issues! You don’t have to anymore.
However, to secure your smart contracts, you need proficient auditors who can provide you with credible smart contract auditing services within no time! ImmuneBytes is the perfect destination for you.
The year 2022 can be epitomized as the ‘year of glory,’ with each smart contract platform taking every necessary step to woo the developers and users. But the question here is what all it takes to be an efficient platform for smart contract development, and how to decide which is the best one? Then, which are the top platforms? Well, that’s what we will discuss in this blog.
What are Smart Contract Platforms?
Though it might sound trivial to you if you are from a software background, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you come across someone writing code? Some questions like: Where do they write it? How do they translate the code to software? Are there any rules governing the code?
Multiple tools foster this mighty development. They revolve around specific syntax and rules and are then executed. You cannot write these codes anywhere. In a crux, several steps are followed in the text journey, becoming the apk within this tool.
These tools for smart contracts are known as smart contract platforms. They only enable, examine, and put into action smart contracts. A smart contract platform should give you access to a framework for creating smart contracts and a testing and execution environment.
This brings us to the next question- what are the features of a smart contract platform?
8 Main Features of a Smart Contract Platform
One major question that comes into people’s minds is how to pick the best smart contract platforms. You need to check whether the following characteristics are in your chosen platform.
These are:
- Creation of a smart contract, implementation, and execution
- Decentralization
- Global execution and access
- Autonomous
- Transparency
- Speed
- Security
- Data backup
Now, let us jump straightaway to some of the best platforms for smart contract development.
Top 7 List of Smart Contract Platforms
There are so many such platforms all over the market. Thus, you need to pay attention to every detail and decide which aligns with your cause.
If you opt for smart contract audit services, ensure the auditors have a thorough knowledge of these platforms.
- Ethereum
In 2015, a novel way called the ICO to raise money was introduced. Also referred to as the OG smart contract platform, after Bitcoin, EVM, or the Ethereum Virtual Machine is the biggest innovation in the blockchain space. This virtual environment enables smart contracts. With this, the Ethereum platform went live.
Being a pioneer in this field, Ethereum has the biggest user and developer community in the business. But it is only possible to audit some smart contracts being used on Ethereum due to its enormous size. Services that examine these contracts and certify them as secure for the users have emerged.
Ethereum dominates the smart contract platforms list because of its strengths and weaknesses. This top smart contract platform has a history of network congestion issues and frequently works at maximum capacity. Transaction fees are high, and transaction speeds still need to improve. Scalability issues resulted from the Ethereum founders’ incorrect estimation of the platform’s ability for growth.
- Polygon
The Ethereum blockchain is a pleasure to work with, but recently, it has been somewhat clogged due to high traffic and several people adding to it. This problem is resolved by layer two solutions that increase Ethereum’s scalability. One such solution is Polygon (also known as MATIC). It is an Ethereum sidechain that combines lower gas costs with Ethereum’s security.
The goal of Polygon, which first appeared as the MATIC network, was to give Ethereum a scalable alternative. The only difference between it and other Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains is that transactions are gathered and settled on the Ethereum blockchain. As a result, Polygon now has Ethereum’s interoperability, liquidity, and security.
A Proof-of-Stake (PoS) sidechain serves as Polygon’s main chain. Where MATIC, the Polygon network’s native currency, is employed as a staking token to verify transactions and cast votes for network enhancements. The gas charges on Polygon are likewise paid using MATIC.
- Starknet
StarkNet is a decentralized, permissionless Validity-Rollup network (often referred to as ZK-Rollup). It functions as an L2 network over Ethereum, allowing any dApp to achieve an infinite scale for processing while maintaining the security and composability of Ethereum.
StarkNet offers composability on par with Ethereum, promoting simple invention and development. Using StarkNet Contracts, developers can quickly implement any business logic on StarkNet. By creating STARK proofs off-chain and subsequently validating those proofs on-chain, StarkNet provides scale while maintaining the security of L1 Ethereum.
- Solana
To achieve great speed and scalability, Solana invented the proof-of-history consensus. It gains a spot among the top-performing blockchains thanks to its strong throughput and scalability characteristics. If the average size of a transaction is no more than 176 bytes, Solana can process up to 710,000 transactions per second. The platform establishes itself as the ecosystem with the highest growth rate and the most adaptable on a global scale.
A computing platform called Solana can communicate with smart contracts. Numerous applications, including NFT marketplaces, DeFi, games, and decentralized lotteries, are powered by smart contracts. The Solana crypto app ecosystem supports assets worth billions of dollars. A user might pick an app that uses Solana because of the high speeds and low congestion, which lead to lower costs.
- Cosmos
It is possible to build blockchains in go on the Cosmos SDK. It is modular, easily customizable, and secure. It makes it simpler to build complex blockchains on top of Tendermint, test the blockchain on the testnet, launch it on the mainnet, and connect to other Cosmos blockchains.
It is open source; the Cosmos developer community maintains that. The Cosmos blockchain enabled communication between distributed ledgers without relying on a single server. When the Cosmos white paper was released in 2016, the network’s creators quickly began referring to it as the Internet of blockchains because they wished to build an open-source platform that would allow open-source blockchains to communicate with one another and simplify transactions.
- Polkadot
As the ecosystem of specialized blockchains known as parachains expands, Polkadot unifies and secures them. The foundation of a truly interoperable decentralized web is provided by Polkadot’s apps and services, which can securely communicate across chains.
You can interact with various blockchains on the Polkadot network thanks to Polkadot. Polkadot has the lowest carbon footprint among proof-of-stake protocols, using the energy equivalent of 6.6 US households annually.
Recommended Polkadot Security Services
- Avalanche
Emin Gün Sirer, the founder of Ava Labs and a professor of computer science at Cornell University, introduced the safe, adaptable, and scalable Avalanche ecosystem for creating decentralized apps. It is one of the quickest, most programmable, and interoperable smart contracts platforms, allowing anyone to create unique blockchain applications. The native token of Avalanche is called AVAX.
The key features of this smart contract development platform are scalability, sustainability, speed, interoperability, flexibility, and security.
Recommended Avalanche Security Services
The Bottom Line
Given that the fields of blockchain technology and smart contract application development are still developing, there is still a lot of ambiguity and misinformation around them. This is why many businesses base their decision on a smart contract platform’s reputation and the level of developer maturity.
ImmuneBytes is a credible smart contract auditing company that has accessed more than $4.1Bn on-chain assets for clients within the last two years. If you require our assistance, you can get in touch with us today!