A Comparative Analysis of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Smart Contract Development

Development of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based applications requires an appropriate platform that meets the application requirements. However, due to the abundance of such platforms such as Ethereum, NEM, IOTA, and OpenChain, and the differences among them in terms of scalability, throughput, and features, it is not easy to select a platform for a given use-case. Selection of the right DLT platform is pivotal for the performance of applications and thus-forth directly affects consumer satisfaction. Therefore, the aforementioned factors must be taken into account to decide on a particular platform. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of different DLT platforms. The choice of platform is based on their popularity and current market share as well as the evolving trends and approaches. In essence, we choose Ethereum, EOS, Hyperledger Sawtooth and NEO. We compare these platforms from both development and performance perspectives. The comparison revealed that Sawtooth provides a huge customization capability that affects the performance and EOS maintains a stable throughput under varying network scales and loads.