* By Starcoin community
In the past two years, with the large market of DeFi, the blockchain industry has been extremely hot. The public chain track has also experienced rapid development, in addition to the known public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, some new and characteristic public chains are also sought after by many people. It is against this background that Starcoin launched main network in 2021. It has many interesting designs and has attracted the attention of many people. You can further understand Starcoin from a number of different dimensions through a horizontal comparison with some well-known public chains in this article.
Consensus
Consensus is the core feature of the public chain, and also is the most critical difference between the blockchain and Internet.
Bitcoin guarantees the trust between strangers through algorithms and eliminates the barriers between distributed nodes, this is PoW consensus, and this is the most interesting part of the blockchain. However, with the development of blockchain technology, various types of consensus have emerged. In addition to PoW, there are other common consensus, such as PoS, BFT.
Among the currently popular public chains, Bitcoin and Ethereum 1.0 use PoW consensus, Diem (new name of Libra) uses BFT consensus, Solana uses PoH consensus, and BSC and Polygon use PoSA and PoS consensus respectively. Like Bitcoin and Ethereum 1.0, Starcoin believes that PoW is the essence of blockchain and the true spirit of Satoshi Nakamoto. Therefore, Starcoin also uses PoW consensus, and has optimized and improved some of the flaws of Nakamoto consensus.
Constant Issue
The economic model is also the basis of the public chain, and deflation or inflation is also a common concern.
Bitcoin is issued constantly and in the long term, is deflationary. Ethereum is not a constant issuance, it will continue to increase every year according to the number, it is an inflation model. But Ethereum achieved deflation by destroying ETH. Like Bitcoin, Starcoin is also issued constantly, and the common public chains such as BSC and Polygon are not constantly issued.
Low Gas Fee
In the early days of the blockchain, the application scenarios were limited, and the gas fee was basically negligible. But with the development of blockchain, especially the explosive growth brought by DeFi, gas fee has become a very important factor and a big bottleneck, this is obvious in Ethereum. The gas fee of a simple transaction requires at least a few hundred USDT , which is a very large cost.
Under the development of DeFi, in addition to the high gas fee of Ethereum, the gas fee of some other public chains has also risen, such as BSC. Polygon is a layer 2 network, so gas is low. Starcoin is a layered network with both first layer and second layer. On the one hand, the gas fee on the first layer is very low. On the other hand, many requirements can also be fulfilled on the second layer.
Using Token to Pays Gas Fee
To solve the problem of high gas fees, it is a very good attempt to use different tokens to pay gas fees. Especially for many potential projects, the distribution strategy in the early stage may bring substantial dividends in the later stage.
Some popular public chains, such as Ethereum, Solana, BSC, etc., do not yet support this feature. Starcoin will support this feature in the future.
Security of Smart Contracts
In the blockchain era, everything is distributed and everything is completely transparent, so security is particularly important.
In most cases, stakeholders will pay attention to avoid bugs in the business model. But in addition to the security of the model, there are also many security risks in the development. In the current smart contracts, Solidity is the most commonly used. As a programming language, Solidity has complete features, but in the special scenario of contract, the security at the language level needs to be improved.
At present, most of the common public chains use Solidity as the smart contract language, such as Ethereum, Solana, BSC, etc. Therefore, some potential security risks in language design, such as overflow, default Public visibility, etc., are easy to cause the entire industry’s panics, such as the famous TheDAO hack.
Get the experience of many real security vulnerabilities in Solidity, Move has designed a new programming concept for resource-oriented programming for smart contract scenarios, and has done a lot of security reinforcement, such as pure static calls, formal verification, and so on. It can be said that Move was specially born for DeFi.
Diem is the first permissioned public chain to use Move as a smart contract, Starcoin is the first permissionless public chain to use Move as a smart contract, and other public chains such as Flow and Near are also planning to support Move in the future.
On-chain Governance DAO
On-chain governance is an important Initiative to guide the healthy development of the ecology, and it is also a very important part of the ecology.
On-chain governance is popular recently, but many public chains do not have this feature, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, BSC, etc. Starcoin supports on-chain governance at first layer, and on the basis of on-chain governance, some interesting business scenarios have been developed, such as safely upgrading contracts. The voting way is cleverly used, and the contract can be upgraded if the most of people agree.
Official Support
The earlier you join the public chain, the more dividends you can get, so rational investors usually make arrangements at this stage.
The popular public chains, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, BSC, etc., have actually passed the biggest bonus period. Starcoin is currently in the early stage of ecological explosion and foundation. For ecological projects, the official will provide strong technical support and publicity support. With the improvement of ecological infrastructure, such as the launch of NFT protocol, Oracle, Swap, Bridge and other projects, the Starcoin ecosystem is likely to develop explosively, and early users and ecological projects will get large dividends.
