🖇️Background

The public blockchain sector is a rapidly evolving and highly dynamic field that has gained significant attention and momentum. Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, has developed over the last decade into one of today’s biggest and most groundbreaking technologies, with the potential to impact every industry from financial to manufacturing, healthcare and educational institutions. Launched in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is the most notable public blockchain infrastructure after Bitcoin. Ethereum provides a Turing complete language for writing smart contracts. The latter can be automatically executed based on a set of criteria established in the Ethereum blockchain.

Despite the explosive momentum gained, and promises of Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are still intrinsic issues, especially related to transaction processing performance. Bitcoin uses Proof-of-Work (PoW) in their consensus algorithm where an extraordinary amount of computing power is spent for calculations, called mining, in order to create a block, while PoS for Ethereum after late 2022. Both Bitcoin and the current Ethereum provide very poor performance in terms of transaction processing speed: around 10 transactions per second (TPS) which is incomparable to traditional electronic payment systems such as VISA and MasterCard.:

The shift to the more environmentally friendly, and more efficient Proof-of-Stake Velocity

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) aims to provide a more environment-friendly and efficient consensus protocol. With PoS, the creator of a new block “is chosen in a deterministic way, depending on its wealth, also defined as a stake”. Some notable proponents of this shift are Ethereum, APTOS, Cardano, and Epic Blockchain.

Here is how Epic Blockchain compares with APTOS, Ethereum and Cardano in terms of consensus protocol, decentralisation, security, scalability/performance, roadmap, and reward.