Ethereum or "ethereum 3.0" is still in the planning phase and it's a far-fetched notion at this point, but there are competing technologies that could change everything. Dfinity is one of those technologies, it was designed to radically speed up all kinds of apps and services by doing some pretty neat things with cryptography. Meanwhile, there's another contender called Polkadot which seeks to improve on the blockchain design by turning networks into interchangeable blockchains.
Both projects are still in the prototype stage, and it's likely they will change a lot before they launch in full production. But if they stay on their current course of development, we'll be looking at the two competing platforms launch within a year (2019-2020). So which one will win? It might come down to speed and usability.
Polkadot vs Dfinity: Which Network is Faster?
Currently, Ethereum is facing serious scalability problems. It can only handle about 17 transactions per second, which is why scaling projects like Sharding are in the works. While it is possible that we'll eventually hit the Sharding goal, it will then be a bit too late to see these projects compete against each other and decide which one comes out on top.
Meanwhile, as of now, Dfinity claims to be able to handle more than 50,000 transactions per second. That would allow for a ton of applications such as exchanging cryptocurrency or tokenized assets, trading stocks, and even instant messaging. By comparison, Ethereum only manages to get around 15 transactions per second at present.
Polkadot vs Dfinity: Which One is Designed to Scale?
The main problems with Ethereum are its security and scalability. As a result, other than developers, it's hard to find people who use the network for anything except storage and value transfer. The reason is because it's very difficult in emergency situations to deploy complex programs on Ethereum and as a result, users have to trust the team that created Ethereum not to steal their funds.
Dfinity is designed to solve these issues from start, which means they don't have to rely on any third-party applications or contracts that could potentially compromise their network security. Instead, Dfinity leverages the power of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in order to create an "ephemeral" distributed network. Ethereum uses a different approach: it leverages the power of smart contracts.
Polkadot vs Dfinity: Which Platform is More Developer Friendly?
The interface of Polkadot is designed to allow developers to rapidly develop decentralized apps (dapps) without having to learn how blockchain works. There are various APIs and SDKs for developing dapps on both Ethereum and Polkadot, so if you're an experienced developer who has already developed dapps on Ethereum, you have little problem adapting to either platform by learning one new API or another. Developers can also use existing libraries and Javascript SDKs with Polkadot, rather than relying on any new frameworks that need to be developed.\