I recently discovered Avalanche on Figment Learn recently, and I have been spending time learning, and writing, all about it. One of the things that I immediately noticed was its similarity with Polkadot: they are both heterogeneous blockchain protocols. This got me interested, and I decided to take a comparative look at both protocols to see how they are similar, as well as how they differ. Here we go.
What are they?
At first blush, one immediately notices how similar they are to one another. They are both “heterogenous” networks, are actually blockchain-of-blockchains (that is they are made up of other blockchains), were built to fix some of Ethereum’s most pressing issues (centralization, poor speed, high gas costs, etc), and are compliant with ERC-20 protocols. But that doesn’t mean they are clones of one another. They actually are different platforms.
For one, their target audiences are different. While Polkadot seems to be interested in being the Blockchain platform for everybody, Avalanche seems to be more focused on financial applications.
For Polkadot, the specialized blockchains (known as parachains) run in parallel using a technique called sharding to improve the network’s scalability. All the parachains content to a central chain called the Relay Chain.
Avalanche, on the other hand, require all subnets to be connected to its Primary Subnet. The to systems are similar.
While they are both a lot faster than both Bitcoin and Ethereum, Avalanche has the upper hand both in number of transactions per second (~4500 to ~1500), an in time to complete transactions (< 3 to ~15). This may be because Avalanche was built for financial assets trading while Polkadot is more of a general purpose platform.
They both have tutorials on Figment Learn, but Avalanche is the only with a Pathway there. While I may be able to find Polkadot learning material elsewhere on the internet, I am currently sticking with the Figment programs, and so I hope they create a Polkadot pathway soon.
