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Ethereum

Ethereum, long recognized as a leader in the blockchain world, has crafted a diverse and mature ecosystem that has become the industry benchmark.

Despite its wide adoption, Ethereum faces challenges in user-friendliness and security, with users required to navigate a lot of the complexity of using blockchain directly, such as blind signed transactions, reliance on seed phases, and potential for wallet drains. This has resulted in millions of dollars of user funds being lost, and many of these issues cannot be fixed easily due to Ethereum’s architecture.

From a development perspective, Ethereum offers a mature platform for dApp development and developer tooling, but as first mover, there are complexities in Solidity and the EVM that results in a steep learning curve to building secure dApps, with the need to perform significant validation and audit.

Overall, Ethereum and the EVM have a significant lead in adoption, with by far the most users, liquidity, and dApps. Its momentum will carry it forward for many years to come, and we can expect more and more third-party tools, such as Truffle and Hardhat, to help cover shortfalls in the underlying architecture.

Solana

Solana, with the SVM virtual machine, stands out with its high-speed and low-cost transactions, non-EVM design, and dedication to the monolithic/integrated design structure, improving composability.

Solana's approach to user experience, characterized by low fees and a unified Token Program, simplifies transactions. However, due to its account-based architecture, blind signed transactions and wallet drains are still all too common, meaning that users must be wary of using the wrong account and interacting with the wrong smart contract, impacting trust. 

On the developer side, Solana has a fast-growing developer community, and Rust is much loved. Developers are, however, required to deal with some low-level intricacies associated with Solana’s parallelized execution model.

Solana is a formidable challenger and continues to gain the most adoption outside the EVM, with significant user and liquidity growth over 2023.

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Aptos

Aptos shares much of the same high-level objectives and blockchain design concepts as Solana but significantly differs in its implementation thanks in large part to the Move programming language and MoveVM, which has an object-based model to assets, as opposed to the account-based model for Ethereum and Solana. 

Aptos offers an innovative token standard, emphasizing ease of use and flexibility, and offers an enhanced user experience by making tokens more predictable, allowing wallets to recognize the tokens in a user’s account (which Solana and Ethereum are not able to do), and provides enhanced security through rotatable signing factors.

On the developer side, Aptos’ Move programming language offers an intuitive experience with its object model, solving issues caused by the account model used by Ethereum and Solana. Aptos’ Move Prover tool further supports the integrity of smart contracts, bolstering security.

Aptos is an up and coming ecosystem, offering an improved UX and DX but has a smaller ecosystem than Ethereum or Solana.

Radix

Radix has taken what it calls a “full stack” approach to designing its layer 1, building its own consensus algorithm, execution environment, programming language, and wallet, with the aim of offering an improved UX and DX. Many features that are tacked-on on other platforms via third party tooling are enshrined as native features of Radix, improving trust and reliability. Similar but different from Aptos, Radix uses an object-centric design that is characterized as an “asset-oriented” programming environment.

This results in a more transparent and predictable user experience as the platform natively understands and governs tokens and transactions. Radix’s architecture also solves other UX issues, such as wallet drains, blind signed transactions, or seed phrases. On the developer side, many commonly used features, such as tokens, NFTs, how transactions are accounted, and how permissions are built into smart contracts, are provided as native first-class features of Radix’s Scrypto programming language and Radix Engine execution environment, improving developer productivity and security as these features do not need to be built by developers, but instead are customized by them, reducing the chances for error, while still providing the flexibility to build any dApp they desire.

This positions Radix strongly for increased user and developer adoption, but, as Radix’s smart contract capabilities only just recently launched in Q3 2023, the ecosystem is behind others so far in adoption.

Conclusion

While Ethereum is the most widely adopted smart contract blockchain today, the limitations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) hold back its ability to offer mainstream-ready user and developer experiences. This has burdened users with insecure security practices, resulting in frequent hacks and exploits. Numerous third-party dApps and wallets look to help improve the user’s experience and safety, but ultimately, there is only so much that can be done due to the inherent constraints of the EVM design.

Solana, a “next generation” smart contract blockchain, offers user experience (UX) and developer experience (DX) innovations with its Phantom wallet, Rust programming language, and low transaction fees. Similarly, Aptos, with MoveVM, introduces several further innovations to make tokens more predictable and development more intuitive. Radix, with its recent mainnet upgrade, takes it all one step further with assets as a native first-class feature of the programming environment, improving not only transparency and confidence for users but also developer productivity and security, setting a new benchmark for Web3 UX and DX. By solving the most comprehensive UX and DX challenges, Radix sets itself up as a clear leader for user and developer experience. While Radix’s ecosystem has grown quickly since the launch of its mainnet upgrade, it requires significant user, developer, and liquidity growth before it can catch up to Ethereum and Solana.