Ivy-lang, Plutus, Solidity, Scrypto, Michelson, Hoon, Rust, …
When should I find the time to explore all these languages? Most of them are barely used, making it incredibly hard to adopt them. Solidity is leading the pack, although, it’s not an easy language to get started with. This article will criticize and give new insights in the following platforms: Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, NEM, Stellar, iOlite, and Lisk.
Finding The Right Smart Contract Platform
I will feature some existing smart contract platforms and some upcoming ones. I’ve selected these based on maturity, flexibility and the innovation they add to our ecosystem.
Ethereum — Old but Gold
Ethereum is always a safe bet. Ethereum is a gold standard in the world of smart contracts and has the biggest capitalization among other platforms. The majority of token sales happen on the Ethereum platform, using the ERC-20 token standard.
However, this standard has some serious bugs which have already led to major losses in the industry. Let me explain this.
ERC-20 assumes two ways of performing a token transaction:
1. transfer(): Send tokens to someone’s address.
2. approve() + transferFrom(): Deposit tokens to a smart contract.
But what if you use transfer() to send tokens to a smart contract by accident? The transaction will succeed but this transaction will not be recognized by the recipient contract.
“For example, if you send tokens to a decentralized exchange contract, then the exchange contract will receive your tokens but it will not credit these tokens to your exchange token balance. Moreover, if the decentralized exchange contract does not implement an emergency token extraction function, then it’s impossible to get your tokens back in any case, resulting in a permanent loss of the tokens. Due to this bug, the Ethereum ecosystem has lost millions of dollars already.”
Source/More: Comparison of Smart Contract Platforms – Hacker Noon
