Smart contract technology has still too much room to grow and there are many big bulls there such as Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, etc.

Smart contracts are one of the hottest areas in all crypto. As far as who will emerge the undisputed king of the smart contracts the battle is only just beginning. You all know, the main players Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (ADA), Binance Smart Chain (BSC). There are a few new kids on the block that could not only rival but possibly even unseat the big boys and the years ahead.

Battling out today are too high-performance layer-1 blockchains with tremendous potential. It promises to be an intriguing matchup.

The Contenders

Today, we have to channel favorites for you fighting out a Silicone Valley by way of Ukraine weighing in at well under $30, the so-called ETH killer Solana and its native token SOL.

For those of you new to the channel, you can learn more about why we’re so bullish on Solana by reading my most recent Medium post below.Solana: More Update For SOL?SOL is going insane and stay tuned for updates new ATH.medium.com

In the other corner, fighting out of Romania by way of Rivendell and weighing in at under $60. Another Channel favorite the great and powerful Elrond, its native token EGLD. Moreover, you can read my recent Medium post about Elrond by clicking the post below.Elrond: Next Best Smart Contract Blockchain?Elrond Gold (EGLD) rises up stable and going to the zenith. Is it the best smart contract blockchain or not?medium.com

Just two smart contract powerhouses trying to claim a smart contract title. Protect yourselves at all times.

Website: https://solana.com/

Website: https://elrond.com/

Solana

Solana launched its mainnet in March of 2020, but the concept behind it burst onto the scene in 2017, when the explosive white paper was published by its founder Anatoly Yakovenko. Yakovenko’s genius was figuring out a way to encode passages of time as data.

This led to his creation of a unique and permissionless system for determining the time of transaction known as Proof of History (PoH).

Why is proof of History such a game-changer? When used alongside Proof of Stake (PoS), Solana’s decentralized clock function creates a unique process. A series of hash transactions in the form of a verifiable order of events. This means the blockchain can work at incredible speed without sacrificing security or decentralization. Say Solana was fast, efficient, or economical in its functions would be the understatement of the year.

Think of the Anderson Silva blockchain technology, the result of the formidable blockchain with mind-bending scalability and throughput. Let’s dive into some numbers:

With a processing capacity between 50,000 and 65,000 thousand transactions per second and a theoretical limit of over 700,000 per second. Solana is lightyears ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum in transactions per second, it’s not even close.

I can confirm that Anatoly Yakovenko is no slouch in the brains department either. In fact, we all owe a great deal to Yakovenko during his 12 years at Qualcomm he pioneered a lot of cell phone technology. We take for granted today.

With Solana, he’s practically invented the Muay Thai of blockchain technology. The team behind Solana pioneered 8-core innovations, powerful tools that combine to give the timekeeping king of crypto. The elegant functionality of a Swiss watch. I mean, is it a coincidence that the Solana Foundation is based in Geneva.

We’ve already touched on proof of history, but one of the other of the 8 weapons and Solana’s arsenal is Sealevel. The world’s first parallel smart contracts runtime. Do you know of any fighter that can throw an uppercut while landing a spinning back kick? Exactly.

Solana has a runtime built to process tens of thousands of contracts and parallel. In fact, runs so well and the entire class of applications only theoretically possible before are now a reality.

Oracles running on Solana can provide price feed updates every 400 milliseconds would cause only 10 bucks per 1 million transactions, you can see why dApp developers everywhere are so keen to jump on board.

SBF chose Solana for the Serum DEX precisely because it was the fastest smart contract crypto on the market. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Solana’s ecosystem is growing larger by the day, in fact, it’s booming. In the reasons why this blockchain is garnering so much hype or clear.

It’s a worthy contender and definitely, one will be following extremely closely. Next into the octagon is Elrond and may be named after a fictional elf don’t be fooled.

Solana Ecosystem

With all these developments, partnerships, and price action, you might be wondering when Solana will finally reach its final form and take SOL to the moon. The short answer is that this isn’t entirely clear, because Solana does not have a clearly defined roadmap at the time of the shooting.

In a related Reddit post, a member of the Solana team noted that beta is quoted as just a word that could be removed at any time or even stay there for a while. In reference to Solana’s mainnet beta.

The closest thing I was able to find to a roadmap was Solana’s governance forum, which is barren besides the earlier updates related to the inflation vote. And speaking of governance, the most recent discussion thread on Solana’s governance forum asked about on-chain governance, which I believe is the final phase in Solana’s development.

One of the answers directs to an unfortunately unrelated repository on Solana’s GitHub, which is likewise seen a noticeable decline in commits since last year.

Given how quickly Solana’s ecosystems growing my suspicion is the Solana’s technical development has been less of a priority over the last few months. After all, adoption is everything in the cryptocurrency space, and Solana has a lot of catching up to do if it wants to spar with the likes of Ethereum and Polkadot.

Luckily for Solana, it has strong support from two very big players in the cryptocurrency space, the FTX exchange, and Alameda Research.

Now, the founder of both companies Sam Bankman-Fried, and besides being one of the richest people in the world. Sam is known to be a financial genius and has lots of connections in the crypto world.

Sam hand-picked Solana as the blockchain to host not just the Serum DEX (SRM), but all the other cryptocurrency projects his companies are developing and onboarding.

As I mentioned earlier Alameda Research shelled out over 90 million dollars on just two projects that are building on Solana.

The first is called maps.me (MAPS), an offline map and travel app with over 140 million users.

The second is called Oxygen (OXY), a DeFi lending protocol that will provide additional infrastructure for map..

Together, they will make it possible to instantly book and manage vacations directly in the maps.me app.

Sam and the Alameda team are also hoping the maps. I will serve as the on-ramp to their DeFi ecosystem. That would be powered by Serum and built on Solana.

MAPS, OXY, and SRM were all sold in IEOs through the FTX Exchange. So, be sure to keep your eye out for any more of those because chances are they’re going to be a part of something huge.

Elrond

This blockchain might just be as powerful as Gandalf himself. Back to business, how does that run straight up to the fearsome Solana? Pretty well, as it happens known as the internet-scale blockchain Elrond’s founders make no bones about Elrond’s ambitions on the world stage.

Elrond speeds scalability and security are beyond impressive. It is a fighter who needs great striking grappling and takedown a fence to compete at the highest level. Elrond blows the blockchain trilemma right out of the water.

First identified by the superintelligence known as Vitalik Buterin, the challenger blockchains are combining true decentralization, scalability, and security. These are simple enough on a case-by-case basis but your blockchains have been able to meet the demands of each without somehow sacrificing the other.

Let’s start with scalability and Elrond’s phenomenon stats. One feature worth mentioning is that when it comes to its native token EGLD. Elrond will never upscale beyond its maximum total supply of around 31 million.

With the first 20 million already minted the remainder will be distributed as rewards to the validators across the network. This gives it a scarcity akin to Bitcoin, which has obvious upside for its strong and committed community.

Aas for scalability on the network, it’s a very different story. This in part is thanks to its foundational Innovation that is adaptive state sharding. Elrond’s team of developers took some of the lessons from other blockchains sharding like Ethereum 2.0 and Zilliqa (ZIL) combining them into a blockchain that can meet the demands of DeFi, NFTs, and of course regular peer-to-peer transactions. And brief, sharding means splitting the blockchain into smaller pieces known as shards. Increasing speed by dividing the transaction between different clusters of validator nodes. And while this concept isn’t unique to Elrond, they’ve raised the bar by implementing three different types of sharding.

1. State

2. Transactions

3. Network

They still parallel processing Elrond can handle a huge number of transactions that scale. The tune of a mighty 15,000 per second. According to runs on the testnet, that’s even said to move up to the hundreds of thousands. The secret sauce to this adaptive state sharding is are unsecured proof of stake consensus method, which uses random sampling of consensus groups to ensure optimal network security while guaranteeing the validity of each transaction.

Elrond might not have infinite resources back to them, but they have an incredible team behind them. Some of the best tech and are combining it to create a super functional platform and seamless user experience. From a developer’s point of view, Elrond is an enticing prospect.

A platform with the real utility to build on support for web assembly where you can write smart contracts and a host of programming languages more than Solana’s C and C++, Rust, and Libra Move. This broad appeal is reflected by Elrond’s thriving ecosystem to list them all would take me well past my bedtime. But as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words.

A great example of Elrond’s footwork is in the Maiar Wallet. A mainnet interface where its hundreds of thousands of users, its product pack some serious punching power. Or, it’s not simply limited to EGLD, but also lets you send and receive BNB and Ethereum. It may well prove the key to unlocking the billion-plus users, they aim to have on the blockchain by the end of the decade.

Now are these two smart contracts. blockchains throw their hats into the octagon. You probably can’t hear the legions of Elrond fans cheering on their favorite piece of technology. That’s because they’re quite nerdy types. Because according to Picolo Research, Elrond has the second strongest community in all crypto. Second only to Cardano (ADA)

This is in part thanks to their pioneering tech but also the team’s engagement with the community at large who do their part by staking well, over 50% of circling supply. Acting his both validators and delegators on the blockchain.

Earning some pretty decent APY in the process. If you dare mess with Elrond, don’t be surprised to find yourself answering to an army of devoted elves. Who will emerge the winner of this bout? The truth is it’s too soon to say.

Conclusion

Five championship rounds may take five years, and given the potential about Solana and Elrond. There’s a good chance. They’ll both end up operating as part of a multi-coin, multi-protocol world. There really is only one way to find out and that’s to stick around for the long term. Sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves just how early we all are, who knows, maybe Ethereum 2.0 will launch by then. But whatever the outcome, we’re in for an exciting ride.

According to Lunarcrush charts, Solana’s social impact is by far high than Elrond’s along with social dominance.

Price Performance of Solana, market cap rank is #14

Price Performance of Elrond, market cap rank is #69