Binance Smart Chain vs Ethereum: What you need to know

There’s a real battle between blockchains to dispute market’s dominance. Ethereum is the first smart contract project that wasn’t involved only with cryptocurrency: it offers a complete ecosystem to build automated and immutable contracts, which can validate any sort of information.

But Ethereum is a victim of its success. The network is constantly overcrowded, and the gas fees (the transaction taxes) are getting prohibitive, especially for smaller deals. That said, a bunch of other projects appeared to directly compete against ETH — and Binance Smart Chain is here to give Vitalik Buterin some trouble.

But what are the differences between Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Ethereum (ETH)? Check it out below:

How old are they?

Ethereum is a decentralized and distributed technology, released on 30 July 2015. Binance Smart Chain was released in September 2020.

There are five years of difference between them, and that’s something that should be taken into consideration. Ethereum is clearly more mature than BSC and has endured the test of time with some competence.

Decentralization

ETH is a decentralized, distributed technology and everyone can run a node to help the network work smoother. On the other hand, Binance Smart Chain is a centralized project created by Binance, the biggest crypto exchange in the world.

According to Messari researchers, that’s exactly the reason why BSC is so fast, cheap and popular.

Transaction costs

Binance Smart Chain is way cheaper than Ethereum — there’s no discussion about that. But things could change soon with the launch of Ethereum 2.0, its biggest update in history.

According to its developers, ETH 2.0 will become fully Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and the transactions will become much cheaper because of it.

Speed

Transactions on Ethereum can take a while to be completed because of network limitations. That doesn’t happen on BSC, though: the transactions are usually confirmed in a matter of seconds.

The bottom line

According to CoinMarketCap, BNB (Binance Coin, the currency behind its smart chain) is in 4th place — only behind to Tether (USDT), Ethereum (ETH) and, of course, Bitcoin (BTC). The dispute is getting interesting for both sides.

BSC is putting a lot of pressure into ETH developers to release its 2.0 update as soon as possible, since Binance Smart Chain is faster and cheaper than its competitor.

But one thing should be noted: BSC isn’t decentralized. That said, we’re not taking about an autoregulated environment where anyone with the money can have a voice within. All those things should be taken into consideration when choosing where to invest.

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