I've developed dApps on 5 blockchains here's what I've learned 📚

I've gone deep on DAOs and #Web3 for the last 9 months.
Developed Smart Contracts and dApps on 5 blockchains.

I'm sharing my learnings to help save you the time to do the same.

As a dApp developer, I'll summarise my opinion of things important to me. Namely the underlying blockchains themselves, coding accessibility, their performance and the programming languages.

I'll relay my experience objectively as possible. However, note that these are my views for my application. As always, please do your own research.

Up front, I'll answer what you may be already thinking:

Why not just stick with Ethereum?
A: For the types of projects I'm developing $GAS fees are a show-stopper. Yep! Eth2 is in the pipeline PoS promises lower fees but 9 months ago I was tired of waiting (and still am).

Why not Level2 protocols?
A: I'm a purest. In principle, I don't agree with adding complexity and hoop jumps to fix something.

Note: all the blockchains I've evaluated are Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

That out of the way, here's a summary of my experience

• Ethereums' Virtual Machine (EVM) is on many blockchains. The EVM is an easy way for other chains to onboard developers from the Ethereum developer community familiar with writing Smart Contracts in Solidity.

• You can pretty much do the same on other blockchains with an EVM as you can in Ethereum. Yet, the Ecosystems are different chain-to-chain. That means the user base, projects you want or need to collaborate with may not be on other chains.

** CELO Blockchain **

• Celo is carbon neutral an important corner-stone this purpose driven blockchain who's mission is to provide prosperity and financial services to everyone.

• Celo is mobile first. The only blockchain I evaluated that comes with Native SDKs for iOS and Android. Many developing economies in all corners of the globe have smart phones before having access to computer.

• Celo has a light identity linking your wallet to your mobile number. This is a really great way to send funds to anyone without knowing their wallet address.

• Celo's has stable coins for cUSD, cEUR, cREAL. P2P payments on a fast transacting EVM.

If you're developing a Native Mobile dApp in developing markets, doing P2P payments and environmentally conscious then Celo is a great choice.

** TELOS **

Remember $EOS? they raised $4Bb in their record breaking ICO. I enjoyed building on it back in 2019. It was technically strong, well documented. Coding in C++, it was a real engineers' blockchain. The tech was good, but let's just say as the market has proved that the team around it did not serve it well.

...Telos to the rescue!

Believing in the tech and seeing an opportunity to fix the wider issues in EOS the Telos team formed, forked EOS and has done a remarkable job iterating it to where it is today: a super fast EVM now sitting on top of a strong native telos platform. In building the EVM the telos engineers patched issues they found in Ethereum 👏. A true DAO! remarkable team and great origin story.

** NEAR Protocol **

NEAR take-aways: The Rust language was a real test of my patience 😅. But once I got over the learning curve... oddly rewarding. So much that I thought I'd never code in Solidity again.

• NEAR protocol does have an EVM but I did not try developing with it.

• Coding on NEAR was the nearest I felt to extending the any chain itself at
  protocol level. It was easy to call other Smart Contracts without a
  virtual machine in the way. It feels light weight and powerful. Bare metal blockchain development here.

** NEO Blockchain **

NEO for me was the biggest surprise! Coding in C# natively on chain with VSCode extensions, debugger, snapshot tools... it's been the shortest learning curve of all the chains. Possibly on par with NEAR in a lot of aspects (so far). I'm building on it now so I'll know more over the next months.

And the winner is?

So after evaluating 5 blockchains for building dApps and Smart Contracts which one will I choose?... sorry I can't pick just one. I don't believe there is a single true Ethereum killer. It depends on the application.
For example, if I was building a DeFi or trading dApp I'd look into Solana. P2P payments Celo, that is different for say and NFT project.

Me? I'm building tech for DAOs and I'll keep sharing my thoughts and learnings along the way.

Follow me on twitter for more. My handle is 'emotf'.