Ethereum vs. EOS vs. Tron vs. Tezos – How do they Compare?

Linas Kmieliauskas
Last updated: | 3 min read

As the battle of the blockchain protocols heats up, developers, investors and dapp (decentralized application) users are trying to figure out which of the industry players might win the race.

Source: iStock/FotografiaBasica

Cryptoasset research firm Bitassist in collaboration with cryptocurrency data analytics firm Omenics took a closer look at the current state of the four major competitors – Ethereum, EOS, Tron, and Tezos.

“While Ethereum dominates as the most decentralised platform, its limited throughput has stunted further dapp activity. What EOS gains in performance capability, it loses in decentralization. Tezos’ novel governance model has shown strong community ownership of the future of the code base. Tron, while owned by a private company, is the second most distributed platform by node count, second only to Ethereum,” concluded James Benett, director and co-founder of Bitassist.

Among other things, this is what they have compared:

Transactions per second

Source: Bitassist Research & Advisory

“EOS currently has the highest throughput among the four protocols, boasting capacity of up to 4,000 TPS. It is important to note that this number reflects the upper limit rather than the day-to-day reality. With a limited number of dapps and users across the platform the highest required throughput is 80 TPS.”

Decentralization

Source: Bitassist Research & Advisory

“Ethereum stands out as the most decentralized platform in the group with no single entity responsible for updates to the core code and also no formal option for transaction reversals. <…> Tezos can be considered the second most decentralized platform among the protocols, requiring a minimum of 80% of all stake coins to reach consensus on appending the blockchain. Similar to Ethereum and EOS, Tezos’ core code is owned by a foundation rather than a private entity. While Tron may be one of the more distributed platforms it is also the most centralized from a governance point of view. With a private entity owning the Tron platform, there is significant lobbying power than can be cast over block producers.”

Distribution (node count)

Source: Bitassist Research & Advisory

“A good measure of the distribution of a network is the number and location of the nodes or block producers actively supporting the public blockchain protocol. Network distribution is extremely important when it comes to censorship resistance.<…> The greater the geographic dispersion of nodes, the more resilient it is to state-sponsored attacks and the more valuable the network is an independent database. <…> We also need to consider the number of nodes in the context of the protocol’s consensus mechanism. It should not come as a surprise to readers that a Proof of Work blockchain has the highest number of nodes since the network relies directly on the competition between miners’ computing power.”

Daily active users (DAU)

30 day moving average

Source: coinmetrics.io

“While Ethereum retains the highest numers of DAU’s today, the flagship protocol has been losing ground to its competitors since February 2018. EOS narrowly leads Tron in active users by just 2.3k, with both chasers sitting around 60k active addresses per day, approximately 22% of Ethereum’s activity.”

Transaction count

Source: coinmetrics.io

“The relevant data is not available for the Tezos platform, however, based on their current TPS capacity we can estimate that they sit somewhere between Tron and Ethereum. The key takeaway from the transaction count data is that Ethereum’s economic activity is currently limited by its TPS throughput. During period of high demand, the flagship protocol consistently reached 100% of it available transaction throughput.”

Decentralized applications (dapps)

Source: Bitassist Research & Advisory

“The chart above compares three metrics. The x-axis shows the total number of dapps, the y-axis shows the percentage of total on-chain activity relating to dapps and the volume of the bubble represents the total number of transactions. As the newest of the protocols, Tezos dapp activity remains difficult to obtain and is excluded from analysis.
Ethereum has a significant lead in terms of number of dapps with 2,2486 as of May 2019. Tron and EOS are in close competition, with Tron leading in total number of dapps by 295 to 271. What EOS lacks in dapps is certainly makes up for in dapp transaction volume with 1.4 million transactions over a 24 hours period or around 28% of the platforms total volume. The Tron protocol has the highest percentage of on-chain transactions being used in dapps, with 50% of its 947k transactions over a 24 hours period being used in dapps. Ethereum has the lowest total dapp transactions of the three, competing just 90,9K over the 24 hours period.”

Community & sentiment

“EOS, ETH and Tron have the highest news sentiment correlation among the protocols. This result is likely driven by EOS and ETH commonly being referenced withing the same news articles. Tezos has shown the lowest correlation with respect to the other protocols, suggesting that news broadcasts often mention Tezos independently of its competition.”