Thanks to the Ethereum blockchain, humanity has been given the opportunity to widely use the technology for its own purposes. Currently, there are many other blockchains that allow the development of decentralized applications, but the attention of developers is still focused on Ethereum. However, no development, especially in the field of high technologies, is possible without competition, and quite often lesser-known blockchain authors offer alternative or even unique solutions. It’s not our intention to find faults with Ethereum or praise other blockchains, but if you want to grow your business using blockchain, it’s worth having an idea about other market players.
We were inspired to write this article by one of the recent projects — Hulk cryptocurrency ICO. Customers approached BeFund with a specific task and ideas about the future solution, but at the initial stage of development they changed the choice of blockchain. Instead of the usual and popular Ethereum, they chose Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The developers of BeFund have already implemented projects for this blockchain more than once and were pleasantly surprised by the customers’ decisions — this indicates a thorough study of the situation and flexibility, which is always good for business. That is why now we would like to analyze in more detail the similarities and differences between the two blockchains, and perhaps this will help you make the right choice.
At first glance, Binanse Smart Chain and Ethereum are very similar. This is not surprising, because BSC is a hard fork of the Go Ethereum (Geth) protocol. The main blockchain standards are practically the same: in Ethereum it is ERC-20, and in the blockchain from Binance it is BEP-20. Decentralized applications and tokens created in BSC are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), so there are numerous cross-chain projects that use data from both networks. So it’s not too difficult for developers to switch between technologies, although there are, of course, some differences. Much more interesting with the possibilities of technology and benefits for average users.
In terms of the number of placed DApps, Ethereum surpasses BSC by three times. But in terms of the number of active addresses, the opposite is true: BSC has 2.6 times more and it amounts to more than 2.2 million records. But the network achieved such success mainly by September 2022, because, unlike its competitor, it used the Proof-of-Stake confirmation method, which is more economically feasible. After the launch of Ethereum 2.0, where the rejection of Proof-of-Work was the main innovation, this trump card of the BSC was beaten, so the gap in the number of active addresses should be significantly reduced in the future.
However, this is not the end of interesting quantitative comparisons. BSC prevails in speed of work and at the same time pleasantly pleases users with commission fees. Its capacity was recorded at almost 12 million transactions per day in May 2021. On average, this indicator fluctuates at the level of 4-5 million, while in Ethereum this number never exceeded 2 million. The main factors of such a discrepancy are: time and cost. Both networks use a gas model for charging fees: BSC users can set their own gas prices and rely on the miners’ commitment. The updated Ethereum has a pricing mechanism for the base cost of gas, which changes according to the popularity of transactions. However, in any case, gas in Ethereum is more expensive. For transferring one ERC-20 token, the network will charge a fee of about $2.5, or $7.5 using the liquidity pool, and it will take at least 13 seconds. A similar operation with the BEP-20 token takes 3 seconds and a fee of $0.03.
In conclusion, we want to say that BSC is ideal for users who need to do many transactions every day. In this case, the savings will not just be noticeable, but simply striking. But why do users still develop projects on Ethereum instead of looking for more favorable conditions on other blockchains? Well, from the experience of our developers, it seems unclear, because the solution on BSC will work just as well as on Ethereum. But from the experience of marketers, everything becomes clear: a recognizable brand always works better than any advertising campaigns of competitors. We will be happy to help develop the project on any blockchain of your choice!
