Introducing Blockchain Networks: What Makes These Networks the Best?

Despite years of development and increased levels of security, the crypto industry is still heavily impacted by hackers. In the first quarter of 2022, online criminals managed to steal nearly $1.3 billion, through 78 recorded incidents. In many cases, the problem was not the protocols, but the hackers’ ability to fool unsuspecting users. But, there were also many instances where flaws and exploits were the reason hackers managed to get away with the money.

That’s why we wanted to do a comparison of some of the biggest and most popular blockchain networks, and see which of them are the best, as well as the most secure.

What are blockchain networks?

A blockchain network is a technical infrastructure that provides smart contract and ledger services to applications. They are basically blockchains that can be used as development platforms to create a variety of blockchain products.

They came back when Ethereum first appeared and shifted the focus of cryptocurrency trading to the potential of the blockchain, as it can be used to build virtually any type of application, protocol or of service that exists off-chain.

As a result, we now have countless Ethereum-like blockchains all offering to serve as alternatives to Ethereum. This leads to more diversification and decentralization of the DeFi sector, and that’s ultimately a good thing from that perspective.

But, having said that, it also leads to the question of which one is better?

Comparison of the 5 best blockchain networks

Solana

• Solana is one of the fastest and most popular Ethereum alternatives.
• At the time of writing, Solana averages 1,482 transactions per second (TPS), with nearly instantaneous processing time.
• The project can easily scale up to 100,000 TPS, and its record was around 400,000 TPS, which is where the network started having problems.
• Its average transaction fee is only $0.00025 per transaction.
• Solana had a serious bug that put $2 million in chips at risk. However, the vulnerability has been fixed.
• The blockchain is considered quite safe due to the high entry barriers to becoming a node, which prevents bad actors from joining. The project had 1,469 nodes as of February 2022.

avalanche

• Avalanche calls itself “the fastest smart contract platform” in the blockchain industry, “measured by time to finality.”
• The project claims that it can support over 4,500 transactions per second.
• A Yahoo Finance report of January 28, 2022, pointed out that Avalanche processed 1.1 million transactions on January 27. This was 96% of Ethereum’s load, and the average avalanche fee was $0.23, while on Ethereum it climbed to $62 per transaction.
• According to Avalanche Explorer, the project has 1,441 validators at the time of writing.
• Like Solana, Avalanche has also had bugs in the past, but it’s managed to fix them since they were discovered.

BNB Smart Channel

• BNB Smart Chain, formerly known as Binance Smart Chain, is Binance’s second blockchain and its answer to the Ethereum network. It was launched to grant Binance access to the DeFi sector.
• BNB Smart Chain (BSC) is capable of handling 160 TPS with full network utilization, with an average TPS at the time of writing being 75.5.
• As of April 5, the average transaction fee on BSC was 0.0008 BNB, which is down 46.67% from the same period in 2021. BNB Smart Chain has been showing the same fee for several months now.
• However, BSC only has 21 validators for its mainnet, with each of them having to delegate 10,000 BNB to get this role. This makes the barrier to entry quite high, but the number of validators is still quite low. Binance solves this problem by selecting validators every 24 hours.

Oasis Network

• Oasis is another scalable, privacy-friendly Layer 1 network that combines low gas charges and high throughput with a secure architecture to establish a foundation for Web3.
• The project claims that it can process up to 1,000 TPS with around 6 seconds of block time.
• Oasis also claims that its fees are 99% cheaper than Ethereum. As for the actual amounts, they are around $0.15 per transaction.
• The project has about 186 validators, with 110 active and the rest inactive, according to Scan Oasis.
• Although better than BSC, it is still quite weak when it comes to decentralization, especially compared to Ethereum’s 300,000 validators in February 2022.

Polygon

• Polygon, formerly Matic Network, is a well-structured and easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development.
• It has a core component called Polygon SDK, which is a flexible framework that supports building various types of apps.
• With its architecture, Polygon claims to be able to process up to 65,000 TPS, with gas charges ranging from $0.1 to $0.5 on average.
• Polygon is designed with 100 validator slots, and each validator must stake 1000 MATIC tokens as collateral in order to run the full node.

Conclusion

According to the details presented of all the networks we have reviewed, Solana seems to be not only the fastest channel, but also the most scalable, cheapest and most secure. It can easily scale up to 100,000 TPS with a max of 400,000, it has nearly 1,500 nodes, and each transaction costs just a fraction of a fraction of a penny.

The project had a pretty serious bug, but they fixed it in record time, and since then they’ve done a lot of work to make sure any similar issues would be removed, which is why we’re recommending Solana as the one of the best Ethereum alternatives the blockchain world has to offer.