What’s the best blockchain to develop an app

Like always before I start if you don't want to read the full article you can just listen to it right here.

Ethereum Background

Ethereum launched in 2014. It’s the brainchild of founder and lead developer Vitalik

Vitalik imagined a system where the computing power of the blockchain’s nodes could be used for more than just hashing a proof of work algorithm. Instead, Vitalik argued, you could use that processing power to execute contracts and applications as part of the blockchain.

These smart contracts and dApps would run as part of the blockchain’s network. Therefore, they’d be decentralized. No one server or computer could control these applications, and they would continue to exist as long as the Ethereum network continued.

This was a revolution for blockchain technology. Up until this point, blockchain had mostly been used as a simple value transfer (like Bitcoin). With the rise of Ethereum, you could write code to run on the blockchain that was tamper-proof and immutable once you submitted it.

Ethereum was the first to successfully implement blockchain smart contracts. They’ve since grown to be the biggest provider of decentralized applications.

NEO Background

The ideas behind NEO also began in 2014. Chinese blockchain and technology experts Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang began consulting with Chinese companies about the potential applications of blockchain.

They started a company, OnChain, that developed blockchain solutions for private companies.

During this time, they also planned a public blockchain that could integrate a whole economy of smart contracts and dApps, along with integrations to the various private chains in existence.

Thus, the idea for NEO was born. However, it wasn’t originally known as NEO. The project’s early name was AntShares. AntShares launched in 2016 after they spent two years of research laying the groundwork. In 2017, it rebranded to NEO due to overlapping problems with the company’s Chinese name.

Since launch, NEO has quickly risen to become a top ten cryptocurrency. It’s the strongest competitor to Ethereum in the smart contracts space. NEO implements many of the same solutions as Ethereum, with support for smart contracts and dApps.

However, it differs in its approach to scalability, programmability, and philosophy.

STELLAR Background

Stellar was co-founded in early 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim and received some initial funding from the payments start-up Stripe while corporate donors have included such luminaries as Google, BlackRock, and FastForward.

McCaleb is the chief technical officer at Stellar.org and also founded and briefly ran the ill-fated Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox and was also the co-founder of Ripple.

At its launch, Stellar was based on Ripple protocol and while the developers were working on its key “consensus code” the network forked — some claimed due to flaws in Ripple protocol

. This was strenuously rebutted by Ripple.

The current system is based on similar models, but now using entirely new code.

Stellar was designed to be a decentralized payment network that would allow international transactions between any currencies, even for people wanting to exchange Steller for bitcoin. It can also act as a decentralized exchange for bitcoins.

In 2016, McCaleb, writing in Bitcoin Magazine, said: “Why Stellar? After years of working in the fintech space, I realized that the world’s financial infrastructure is fundamentally broken, leaving billions without resources.

“Since anyone can participate in the network, it can be particularly helpful for the two billion unbanked people worldwide.”

ETH programming language

Solidity is an object-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts. Smart contracts are programs that govern the behavior of accounts within the Ethereum state.

Solidity was influenced by C++, Python, and JavaScript and is designed to target the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Solidity is statically typed, supports inheritance, libraries, and complex user-defined types among other features.

With Solidity, you can create contracts for uses such as voting, crowdfunding, blind auctions, and multi-signature wallets.

Pros of solidity

· Safety

· Security

· Smart contracts provide a secure, easy, and reliable medium for various sources that have the involvement of two parties to do an agreement on something.

Cons of solidity

· Once a contract is made it cannot be upgraded. We cannot add additional features to it.

· The need to learn a new language often scares away developers who are new to smart contracts development. This is a barrier to developer adoption.As solidity is a new language in a market so, it has more drawbacks than other languages like Python, C++, and Javascript.

· Concerning bugs, other languages have a definite edge over this because different languages have a large number of developers to resolve them.

· Arrays and Strings structure and usage are very complicated due to the unavailability of Standard Library(Every language has its library to perform functions).

NEO programming language

NEO has done away with the need to write smart contracts in a specific language. Instead, they allow a variety of popular programming languages to write the contracts and dApps.

These include C#, Java, and Python. In the future, NEO plans to add support for more languages. This makes developer adoption easier, and it leads to lower switching costs for average developers to get started with smart contracts.

CONS

· Price

· The cost of creating or migrating a smart contract includes the base cost 100 GAS plus optional function fee the contract requires. The function fee for storage is 400 GAS. The function fee for dynamic invocation is another 500 GAS.

PROS

· NEO did set a relatively high cost ( 490 gas) as a requirement to avoid trashy/scammy projects.

· Easy to implement

Stellar development platform

The development solutions from Stellar remain simpler and faster than those provided by complex development platforms. This simplicity and speed serve as a unique selling point for the platform.

The smart contracts provided by Stellar are non-Turing complete, which means that they can only provide simple functionalities for basic applications.

However, this actually adds value to Stellar’s offering as a development platform for those developers and organizations which seek simplicity. In addition to simplicity, lowers costs and higher speeds also prove to be beneficial.

This unique differentiation of Stellar’s offerings as compared to platforms such as Ethereum can give Stellar a significant edge.

PROS

· Cost-effective is really cheap

· Really fast

CONS

· You cant build complex smart contracts using the stellar protocol. If you want to implement a blockchain that stores the information you would need to create your own as 180NF did.