Staking
(I use some of the same Cardano terminology for Polkadot here to make the comparison more clear (I hope). Polkadot has nominators (delegators) and validators (pools).)
Polkadot
- Unbonding period of 28 days. Tokens are locked up and to be able to start using them you have to wait 28 days.
- Slashing. You can lose DOT as a punishment if a pool misbehaves.
- There is a minimum amount of DOT required to earn rewards. This amount is dynamic and I couldn't find out how much it is currently. I've seen people in threads talking about 135ish DOT (135 DOT is $2,970 currently).
- You can delegate to up to 16 pools and once pools are elected to produce blocks the protocol will pick one of those 16 pools for you to support with your stake.
- A pool is "oversubscribed" once it has more than 128 delegators. This means only the top 128 delegators as measured by amount of stake allocated to that pool will receive rewards. All other delegators don't earn any rewards.
- To be able to run an active pool you need a minimum amount of DOT. This amount is dynamic and depends on certain factors. Currently you need more than 1.7M DOT, at current price that's $37.8M (yes, that's real... I triple checked it on their wiki).
- Returns: 14.1%
Cardano
- Tokens aren't locked. You can move them whenever you want.
- There are no punishments, Cardano works with incentives instead. You can never lose ADA, you can only lose out on potential rewards if a pool doesn't perform.
- There is no minimum amount required to earn rewards. You only need a 2 ADA deposit to register your wallet and 0.17 ADA for the transaction fee.
- You delegate your stake to one pool.
- Pools can become saturated. Any stake over 100% saturation will not give the pool additional rewards but since there are more delegators the pool will need to divide the same rewards to more delegators which diminishes the rewards per delegator (I'm not 100% if this is accurate but it's close enough).
- Returns: 5-6%
There is more to it but I don't think it is necessary to get into it more. You can learn more about Polkadot staking here: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-staking
And this is a great place to figure out what staking is on Cardano: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cardano_ELI5/comments/kwmli8/what_does_it_mean_to_stake_your_ada/
Monetary policy
Polkadot
- Total Initial Supply: 10 million.
- Total Planned Inflation: Unlimited.
- Maximum Token Supply: Unlimited.
- Inflation Rate: Dependent upon the staking rate in the network, but maxes out at 10% as the staking ratio approaches 50%.
Cardano
- Circulating supply: 31 billion.
- Total Planned Inflation: 14 billion.
- Maximum Token Supply: 45 billion.
- Inflation Rate: Every 4-5 years half of the reservers (the 14 billion) will be used. So inflation rate will reduce over time.
- This is basically the same as Bitcoin. 21 million max supply, circulating supply 18.6 million and every 4 years there is a halving event that slows down inflation.
For more details on Cardano's monetary policy see the official documentation: https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/cardano-monetary-policy.html
Treasury and Governance
Polkadot treasury
If you want to make a proposal for funding from the Polkadot treasury you need to deposit 5% of the asked funds or at least 100.000 DOT. This amount is burned if the proposal is rejected. Proposals are decided on by the council which consists of a maximum of 24 "actors" (currently 13).
Cardano treasury
Proposals on Catalyst for the Cardano treasury don't require a deposit. You make a proposal, you get feedback from the community, you refine it and then all the ADA holders can vote on it and the proposals with the highest votes get funding. Project Catalyst is still an experiment and will be refined over time. https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/index
Polkadot governance
Changes to protocol parameters etc. go through a referenda process. Anyone can propose a referendum by depositing the minimum amount of tokens for a certain period (number of blocks). The proposal with the highest amount of bonded support will be selected to be a referendum in the next voting cycle. There can also be council referenda. When all members of the council agree on a proposal, it can be moved to a referendum.
The council is called upon primarily for three tasks of governance: proposing sensible referenda, cancelling uncontroversially dangerous or malicious referenda, and electing the technical committee. A proposal can be canceled if the technical committee unanimously agrees to do so.
There is a lot more to it. It's a complicated topic. I thought it was important to point out that the council of max 24 actors has a lot of control here. If you want to know more read this: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-governance
Cardano governance
There is nothing known about Cardano's governance yet except for the CIP procedure as far as I know. My guess is it will look a lot like Catalyst. If anyone knows please comment.
Consensus Protocol
(There is a lot here that I don't understand and don't know but I wanted to add this subject anyway. I have no clue what is better and what is not. Polkadot was inspired by Ouroboros Praos (Cardano) and GHOST/Casper FFG (Ethereum). They have different philosophies on subjects like finality, how to scale, how to deal with attack vectors, etc. but most of this goes over my head so I kept it simple. Do your own research if you want to know more.)
Polkadot
Nominated Proof of Stake
Hybrid consensus splits up the finality gadget from the block production mechanism.
BABE is the block production mechanism that runs between the validator nodes and determines the authors of new blocks. BABE is comparable as an algorithm to Ouroboros Praos, with some key differences in chain selection rule and slot time adjustments. 51% byzantine resistant.
GRANDPA is the GHOST-based finality gadget. 30-20% byzantine resistant.
https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-consensus
Cardano
Dynamic Proof of Stake
Ouroboros. 51% byzantine resistant.
https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/understanding-consensus.html
Scaling Solution
Polkadot uses sharding and claims to eventually be able to do 1 million tps. Cardano will use Hydra as a layer 2 solution which will scale to whatever is necessary. Here is an interesting 4:00 minute video on why IOG decided to not use sharding and instead chose for the Hydra approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHus4eqPID4 I would like to add that this amount of scaling is also not necessary yet. For the next couple of years Ouroboros by itself can scale enough (1000 tps when optimized) to deal with the demand.
Interoperability
Polkadot focuses on interoperability with other blockchains a lot more than Cardano. It calls itself "the blockchain of blockchains" and the idea is that you can develop complete blockchains with ease (using Substrate which is a blockchain framework) on top of Polkadots parachains which all share the security of the main Relay Chain and benefit from interoperability with eachother. This explanation probably doesn't do it justice but I am trying.
Cardano is seeking to be interoperable with legacy systems and other cryptocurrencies. Cardano is going to integrate KMZ sidechains to do this. You can find Cardano's philosophy on interoperability here: https://why.cardano.org/en/interoperability/the-grand-myopia/
Smart Contracts
Polkadot will not support smart contracts natively. This feature will be build by other projects on top of their parachains. Moonbeam and Edgeware are two of those projects. It was rumored that Moonbeam would bring smart contracts to Polkadot in Q2 2021.
Cardano supports smart contracts natively starting with Plutus and Marlowe which will be released in Q2 2021. Plutus is a completely new haskell based smart contract language designed by Phillip Wadler, the creator of Haskell. Marlowe is a domain-specific language (DSL) based upon the Plutus platform and it allows domain experts to build financial contracts without having to first master a difficult programming language. Marlowe utilizes visual programming tools (lego-like blocks) in an online development environment to implement standard financial instruments. Marlowe is an easy-to-use smart contracts development platform optimized for finance. It is a fast track for finance experts and finance engineers to build smart contracts with blockchain technology. It is also a prototype DSL for similar languages in insurance, supply chain and legal.
Network Decentralization
Polkadot
Validators (pools): 297
Nominators (delegators): 6,751
Total staked: 60%
https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/staking
Cardano
Pools: 1,577
Wallets delegated: 192,255
Total staked: 70.15%
Community
r/dot has 12k users.
r/cardano has 140k users.
I'm not going to look up other social media because I doubt it's going to make a difference.
Development progress
Cardano doesn't have smart contracts, governance, interoperability or a scaling solution developed yet.
Polkadot has sharding as a scaling solution and governance but no smart contracts or interoperability (as far as I know).
Polkadot will not support smart contracts natively. Smart contracts will come to Polkadot in Q2 2021 on a parachain. Cardano will support smart contracts natively and they will be released in Q2 2021 as well. Polkadots governance solution is easier to develop than what Cardano is doing with Catalyst because they use a centralized council who makes a lot of the decisions which is much easier than a DAO.
You can argue Polkadot is ahead, you can argue they are equally as far and you can argue Cardano is ahead. It's just how you perceive it. It doesn't really matter anyway imo.
And I don't want to come over too biased but I think it is important to mention that IOG uses a rigorous first principles approach with academic peer review, formal methods and a functional programming language. This just matters too much to not mention. I'm not aware of what Parity's development standards are except that Polkadot is written in Rust but it's likely lower than IOG's.
Miscellaneous
Polkadot has Kasuma which is bascially an incentivized testnet like the Cardano ITN that ran for 6 months except this is a permanent testnet for Polkadot. It replicates real world scenarios much better than a regular testnet.
This is just a weird design decision I came across and I wanted to mention: In order to activate and use DOT, you must deposit and maintain a balance greater than 1 DOT. Without the existential deposit of 1 DOT, the account will be wiped from the blockchain’s state to conserve space, along with any funds in that address. Currently 0.9 DOT is almost $20. So they might just delete your $20 if you don't pay attention.
If you think I have been unfair or something should be changed/added please let me know. There is obviously a lot more to it than what I wrote here but I thought this was adequate for now as a comparison. I could've also added e.g. 'Vision and strategy to adoption', 'Research' and go deeper into decentralization and distribution but I have no clue what Polkadot does on those fronts and tbh I don't think it will be on par with Cardano anyway. I tried to keep my own opinion out of it as much as I could but of course I am biased towards Cardano, sue me.
I made this because I saw yet another thread asking for it and some comparisons I've seen lately on youtube are tbh very lackluster or bad.
Here is another breakdown from a month ago with some additional information: https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/comments/ko66bm/cardano_vs_polkadot_breakdown_detailed_overview/
No comments:
Post a Comment