Ethereum has been at the forefront of the DeFi industry boom. However, the Bitcoin community believes that with the unlocking of innovation on the blockchain, it is proving to be a competitor to existing players. ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees recently responded to tweets from those Bitcoin supporters who have argued for its dominance in the smart contract space.
In a tweet, Voorhees explained that the presence or absence of smart contracts protocol is not a matter of debate. Instead, he said,
“Bitcoin has some smart contract capability, but it is much more limited than other protocols such as Ethereum.”
Adding that ETH, as a result, has “greater complexity and attack surface.” Well, Ethereum is currently the largest chain, both in terms of Total Value Locked (TVL) and the number of on-chain protocols, even when its TVL share has reduced from 97% in January this year to 65%, at the time of writing.
On the other hand, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson was quick to respond by declaring,
“Cardano’s EUTXO and Plutus have the expressiveness of Ethereum with the attack surface of Bitcoin.”
The turf of smart contracts
Earlier this year, Alonzo’s hard fork gave Cardano smart contract functionality. The upgrade implemented the Extended Unspent Transaction Exit (EUTXO) model on Cardano, as an extension of the UTXO model used by Bitcoin. According to the Cardano Foundation, the EUTXO model provides better “scalability and privacy” to the network, as well as “adding custom data to all outputs”.
But, ADA’s price action has been somewhat unconvincing since then. In the context of the FUD around Cardano, Hoskinson had said in a recent interaction,
“They’re terrified because you don’t need a magical Cardano 2 to survive. It’s a future-proof design and we consistently work on it with the strongest, most engaged community, brick by brick.
Even with the price sluggishness, it is worth noting that Cardano has turned out to be one of the most active chains on the network, recently overtaking Ethereum in daily transaction volume. Only second to the king coin.
And, when it comes to Ethereum, Cardano claims that Plutus is scripting “supports user-defined tokens” with much less coding.
With that, in another update, a Cardano developer introduced three reference scripts under Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs), which include proposals to improve Plutus.
The CIP-31 aims to enable “eUTXO as a reusable information storage mechanism” which essentially increases the expressiveness of the chain. Developer IOHK, who calls himself KtorZ on Twitter, also Explain that the following two proposals would make channel information readily available.
