Ardor is the latest in the growing field of contenders for blockchain as a service (BaaS) providers. Ardor provides the blockchain infrastructure for businesses and institutions to leverage the strengths of blockchain technology without having to invest in developing custom blockchain solutions. Instead, Ardor offers a main chain that handles blockchain security and decentralization plus customizable child chains that come ready to use, right out of the box, for various business applications. The developers of Ardor are the same company behind the open source Ethereum’s ERC20 protocol to build on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They pay fees in Ether. To test Ardor’s capabilities and serve as an example of an operating child chain, the Ardor developers have created Ignis. Ignis will implement all of the customizable features that come from the Nxt code base. Essentially, Ignis will be a proof of concept and could be the first of many more child chains on the Ardor platform. The Ignis ICO recently raised $15 million in funding for development. In the future, Ardor child chains could be used to create equity trading platforms, digital file transfer services, private enterprise blockchain applications, and many more use cases. Ardor’s strengths are quick time to setup and wide customizability, making it a great option for companies looking to leverage blockchain without the resources to dedicate to custom development. Ardor has many architectural advantages. One of them and perhaps the most influential one is that it has been created using Java; one of the most widespread programming languages in the world today. This is definitely a step in the right direction seeing as it becomes ten times easier for a commercial application to succeed if the development language is one which most programmers can relate to.
EtherZero, abbreviated ETZ, is a hard fork on ethereum providing no-fee, high expansibility, real-time transaction or operation feedback services. Aiming to be a general-purpose smart contract platform, ETZ helps developers set up DAPPs that not limited in finance and business scope, but those more frequently used in daily life, to popularize decentralized services to more people and industries. ETZ eliminates the gas fee system from Ethereum network core and adds a Transaction Restriction Policy Protocol layer that associates the threshold, frequency, depth, etc. of initiating transactions with the account balance to combat DDOS like attacks. In particular, ETZ also draws on DASH's two-tier network architecture built with Masternodes transaction verification network and blockchain ledger layer, and its built-in community autonomous system to provide users with real-time operation feedback and high transaction concurrency, no longer need to wait for a long transaction confirmation time. ETZ picks the proven experience of Ethereum on smart contracts, removes its less scalability gas-based fee system and designs a fully accountable trading limit and security strategy against DDOS Class attacks. The final two-tier network composed of the main node and pow consensus layer laid the foundation to achieve free of charge, high concurrency, real-time transactions, independent evolution and several other features. What does no-fee mean to DApp Dev? Taking a simple Todolist DApp as an example, its decentralized implementation can be applied to the team task decomposition process, which requires all participants in the project to know the tasks of other members. Each task is a team consensus result with demand of traceability. The application involves registration of members, additions, deletions and alterations of tasks. According to Ethereum development requirements, all of these operations require gas consumption, which is clearly unreasonable for the users of the application. While in EtherZero, the transaction initiation frequency and the execution depth of smart contracts will be positively related to the balance possessed by the account. This mechanism is similar to POS, it takes into account the fair use of bandwidth and set a relatively high capital threshold required to launch a DDOS attack by malicious attackers while providing free services. This kind of limited and cost-effective free mechanism will spread the decentralized application into the scene of life.