Pick Your Platform: Helping Business Leaders Unlock the Potential of Public Smart Contract Protocols

One of most interesting concepts that Alex Tapscott and I studied in our research for Blockchain Revolution was the smart contract—a distributed application that executes the terms of an agreement. The brainchild of Nick Szabo, the concept of the smart contract combines Szabo’s expertise in computer science, cryptography, and the law with his keen observations of human behavior individually and in institutions.?

The purpose of the smart contract is to reduce costs by eliminating intermediaries. In doing so, it demonstrates the power of blockchain protocols to establish and maintain a workable form of trust—trust in code—between parties acting in their own self interests.?

At the Blockchain Research Institute, many of our members have been interested in experimenting with smart contracts because they help to automate more types of transactions online. But with this growing interest, a critical question arises: Which smart contract platform is the right fit for your particular use case?

This is the focus of the Blockchain Research Institute’s groundbreaking project, “Which Smart Contract Platform Do You Need? A Framework for Evaluating Blockchain Systems with an Analysis of the Top Eight Protocols,” which has just been released to the Creative Commons.?

Deciding which smart contract platform to use is a daunting task for people without domain expertise, so we found a domain expert to lead this project: Massimo Bartoletti , an Associate Professor at the University of Cagliari who specializes in developing tools and techniques for analyzing and verifying software with a focus on security. He is also director of the node of the Cybersecurity National Lab for the University of Cagliari, and he founded the Blockchain at Unica Lab, one of the first academic research groups on blockchain technologies in Italy. The lab is currently investigating custom domain-specific languages for smart contracts. Massimo’s deep knowledge and academic rigor made him the perfect partner on this project. We think you’ll agree.

There two kinds of blockchains available for enterprise users. The first are private blockchains, such as Hyperledger Fabric or R3 Corda, and the second are public. This research focuses on the top eight public platforms—the original Bitcoin blockchain, of course, followed by Ethereum, Cardano, Tezos, Hedera, Algorand, Solana, and Avalache. All of these protocols are permissionless; you don’t need permission to run decentralized applications on them.

This research project presents a framework for evaluating each of these platforms based on seven criteria:

1. Security: How resilient is the platform's consensus protocol to malicious attacks?
2. Performance and Scalability: Can the platform handle a growing volume of transactions, and can it do so efficiently?
3. Development Costs: How costly is it to develop smart contracts on the platform? How can we keep our development costs low?
4. Execution Costs: How much does it cost to run smart contracts on the platform, and how can these costs be minimized?
5. Environmental Impact: This is more important than ever. People outside the Web3 space tend to think only of Bitcoin, how it burns electricity in order to protect the digital assets stored on it. The good news is, all the other platforms in this study use significantly less energy than Bitcoin by several orders of magnitude, and have much smaller carbon footprints.
6. Expressivity: How expressive are the contract languages the platform supports? Can we write contracts with complex behaviors?
7. Research and Development Funding: This is so important. Somebody—some group of people—needs to steward the ongoing development of the platform: the upgrades, the bug fixes, the new features. Otherwise, the platform falls behind improvements to the underlying science and technology and becomes riskier to use. So we looked at the availability of grants and other funding to support the platform and its ecosystem of tools.

The paper concludes with a discussion of other aspects that business leaders and developers could consider when choosing a smart contract platform.

In producing this paper, the BRI undertook its most comprehensive peer review process to date. We sent each section to its respective platform for review and feedback, and Dr. Bartoletti carefully considered all the feedback received. Heartfelt thanks to the following experts who reviewed the paper and provided their feedback: Tas Dienes (Ecosystem Support, Ethereum Foundation ); Matthew Schmenk (Senior Business Development Associate, Ava Labs ); Richard Bair (Vice President of Software Engineering, Hashgraph ); Christian Hasker (Marketing, Hashgraph ); and four additional reviewers who wished to remain anonymous.

The findings presented in this project aren't merely about evaluating platforms; they are a compass for business leaders steering their organizations toward a future of efficiency, security, and innovation.? Whether you're a seasoned innovator, a forward-thinking entrepreneur, or an aspiring student, this research is your gateway to unlocking the potential of public smart contract platforms. It's a tool to refine your use case, learn from past experiments, and strategically select the blockchain that aligns with your goals.?

The full report is available in the BRI Research Library here:?

https://www.blockchainresearchinstitute.org/project/which-smart-contract-platform-do-you-need/??

We’d love to hear what you think!

Don Tapscott is author of 16 widely read books about technology in business and society, including the best-seller Blockchain Revolution, which he co-authored with his son Alex.? He is Co-Founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD, Chancellor Emeritus of Trent University in Canada and a Member of the Order of Canada.