When a co-founder of a blockchain platform like NEM takes some light shots at Ethereum and smart contracts, in general, it’s gold! That is essentially what happened when Jeff McDonald, co-founder of NEM, had a sitdown with a journalist to talk about the difference between the NEM blockchain and Ethereum.
During the interview, McDonald mentioned:
“Projects use NEM if they want a secure blockchain for their platform. If you want to raise a lot of money, Ethereum has built a whole ecosystem where you can make it, and become a part of the organization.”
Without directly saying it, he threw a bit of a shot at Ethereum’s recent hacks, saying:
“NEM doesn’t give millions of dollars to anybody, we believe that our secure technology is a filter. The projects who want safe and secure technology they choose NEM.”
NEM Security Over Ethereum Funding
McDonald himself recognized that Ethereum is superior when raising funds. That is why most of the initial coin offering projects head to Ethereum as their base platform.
That being said, Ethereum has also been made famous by the number of hacks that have taken place within the blockchain. The most recent hack, whether the money was returned or not, in the end, contributed to the price of Ethereum plummeting in the market.
Many people within the blockchain community have constantly debated on which is better — Ethereum or NEM. An interesting analogy came up that compared Ethereum to HTML and NEM to WordPress. If we really think about it, it actually might fit. Ethereum smart contracts are essentially built from scratch, with only blockchain as the foundation. NEM is more of a user-friendly platform with other features. People like Jeff McDonald at NEM believe that the system’s preprogrammed functions bring more security as users are not totally dependent on the skill of the programmer who built a smart contract essentially.
So far, Ethereum has had way more hacks and money stolen, but the platform does have a lot more users. Maybe if people started switching to NEM, it would suffer the same fate.
NEM’s Focus Is On Medium and Small Businesses
While McDonald recognized that it wouldn’t hurt the company to increase the number of transactions and money transferred, he insisted that it wasn’t the goal. He later said:
“Our focus is getting adoption and real people using blockchain.”
The way that NEM works, it clearly reflects this statement — an easier to use platform that can benefit smaller companies that otherwise would not be looking into blockchain to expand their business.
Although they have always been pitted against each other with these comments by McDonald, maybe NEM isn’t chasing after Ethereum after all! Better yet, McDonald may be playing the underdog card, hoping it will bring more investors to NEM. In any case, only time will tell if NEM can catch up to Ethereum.
