How to think about Ethereum VS Polkadot

Vitalik and Gavin Wood recently did a Digix fireside chat on Ethereum 2.0 and Polkadot.

As someone who contributes to both ecosystems, I found the following discourse to be clear and concise, in terms of how to navigate true intention vs speculation in existing communities.

We should get a third party, i.e. Digix to promote this content more. The talk had a small audience, adn they didn’t do much followup ensuring this material gets more widely shared.

Here’s a very rough transcript of the original discourse:


Is there a common ground between Polkadot and Ethereum? What do the projects represent in the ecosystem?
Gavin: Projects with tokens will inevitably attract attention & speculation around competition.

You are resource constrained. You want to put resources into the project that generates the most profit. But the competition [between the two platforms] is entirely only in this regard. An analogy for this train of thought is that you can either choose to buy Microsoft stock or IBMV stock.

In reality, there’s very little direct competition in terms of the product.

Polkadot is interested in being a meta protocol, with a lower level abstraction than Ethereum, i.e. smart contract level.

Polkadot pushes out different goals. Those goal are around chain upgradability, governance, interactivity. Polkadot wants to facilitate interactions that are much more about say, off-chain on-chain cooperation than interactions in a smart contract.

Vitalik: I generally agree with a lot of that. Polkadot tests out very different technical and economic hypotheses. There are big differences in terms of relationships between protocol and applications and what expectations applications have at the protocol level.