Why did we build our blockchain activity on EOS instead of Ethereum?

The debate over EOS versus Ethereum has persisted since the launch of EOS last year. It was a discussion we had internally when we started the process of planning our own blockchain-based technology.

Our evaluation criteria were simple: we had to choose a technology that could support an endless financial market, endure heavy regulation and be consumer-centric.

In the end, it was not a fair fight. To design an enterprise clbad financial product using a highly scalable, low latency, no transaction cost chain of blocks, EOS was our choice. In our opinion, it is currently the best public blockchain platform available. We chose EOS for several key reasons:

The first, and perhaps most obvious, is the ability of EOS to execute more transactions per second than Ethereum. This feature is essential to support a workable financial market with the potential for scalability many times. Established and sophisticated markets include tens of millions of transactions per day. The Nasdaq, for example, records more than 10,000,000 total transactions each market opening day, in the space of six and a half hours.

Although no blockchain technology is at this capacity, EOS can currently run more transactions per second than Ethereum. For comparison, EOS can process more than 1,000 transactions per second (tps), while Ethereum can currently support 10 to 20 tps. The record number of transactions per second recorded in the EOS network monitor is 3,996. With Ethereum, it is around 26 tps. On a cumulative scale, this difference only increases.

Second, the design of EOS means that we can evolve our platform without impacting users, regardless of anything that can be done on the blockchain. This is essential to the sustainability of our business and is therefore an essential criterion of our decision. The EOS platform is designed for parallel execution so that it can theoretically reach millions of transactions per second.

Third, EOS provides an extremely robust authorization and governance structure. This includes features such as account-level permissions, which in financial markets are essential for functionality.

The EOS platform provides important support by giving account-level / role-level and group-level permissions. In the case of financial transactions, this means determining whether an action is duly authorized. EOS provides precise and precise control over who can do what and when. This feature is like multisig in Ethereum, but much more flexible.

Fourth, the transaction costs on the EOS blockchain are much cheaper than on Ethereum. This means we can bet on bigger profit margins.

On the Ethereum network, there are many pending transactions, of about 5,000 at a time. For this reason, users have to pay ever higher "gas prices" for transactions to be compensated. In other words, some transactions in Ethereum will never be executed unless additional fees are paid to integrate a transaction into the dashboards of the miners. Without this additional cost, the transactions would remain in the Ethereum purgatory.

With EOS, on the other hand, the transaction processing fee is zero for the end user. Blockchain application developers pay the cost by staking EOS tokens to reserve computing resources such as CPU, RAM and net.

Last but not least, the development of smart contracts in EOS is done in C ++. For technology developers, this provides a huge amount of control. C ++ is a complete and tested language, offering reliable functionality to developers and engineers. Since we are building a business-grade financial technology product, we did not want to take a risk with the relatively young, yet proven language used for Ethereum, Solidity. And we simply find that C ++ is a superior product in which our team was very experienced.

For these reasons, we chose to go ahead with EOS. We also believe that these are the reasons why EOS will be the foundation of the future financial markets. Its design is well suited to the growth and sophistication of such a market, and we are confident in its ability to support our own design.

Satya Avala is co-founder and chief technology officer of Ampersand Markets and former director of engineering at Yahoo Finance.