How does Fusion (and AnySwap) Compare?
Written 2021-12-28
Fusion vs Ethereum
Ethereum has become the most highly adopted blockchain, with a multitude of projects launching their tokenomics ontop and a number of tools being built to enhance use by all kinds of different entities. Yet the base protocol of Ethereum doesn't offer anything unique, at least when compared to a couple of the forks, which has continued to enhance what Ethereum started. Ethereum is also still a very expensive and not very scalable Proof of Work protocol and although it's doing its best to transition to a Proof of Stake consensus with a much higher throughput this has yet to happen, and is happening in a stage-wise transition. In the meantime users of Ethereum find themselves charged with insane gas fees, sometimes exceeding 100 USD and whether or not this will end soon or not is very unclear. Fusion has no such overcrowding issues and can handle at least 500 000 txs/hour. Being a PoS version of Ethereum it can do everything that Ethereum can and more (such as QS, TL and USAN). Fusion also holds patents regarding cross-chain maping, time-framing and multi trigger mechanisms which are in use in the EVM compatible part of Fusion. This also makes it very easy to use all the tools built for Ethereum with Fusion and to expand on them in new ways. A good example of this is the popular wallet Metamask which is easily customized to work with Fusion. Ethereum and Fusion addresses are the same, so moving from Ethereum to Fusion is extremely easy. Even porting over an entire tokenomics, would be quite doable. Something that may well become neccessary for many projects if gas fees on Ethereum continue to remain high.
Fusion vs BSC, HECO, OKex Chain, Fantom, Polygon, AVAX and other EVM compatible blockchains.
There are however, many, many chains that also can work just like Ethereum and who could replace it just as easily as Fusion could. So, what advantages does Fusion have over these chains? In many cases Fusion will actually be more expensive and have less throughput than these alternatives (at least in the case that $FSN would gain a lot in value), but this doesn't really matter (at least not now), because none of the chains (including Fusion) are anywhere near their scalability limits. These chains could all grow 100 - 1000 times and could still easily serve more people. Since there are so many chains that could effectively replace Ethereum, perhaps it's best that it's not really entirely replaced, but rather complemented by a number of different chains serving various purposes (one could argue that this is a process that now has already started and BSC, HECO, OKex Chain, Fantom, Polygon, AVAX have already taken on some of the load Ethereum would otherwise have had to take). Fusion's role in this replacement would most likely not be the "High speed/high throughput" chain in this network of chains. Instead it'd be the chain most highly specialized in advanced financial transactions. Fusion's Quantum Swaps for example open up the possibility to perform any type of OTC-deal with crypto-assets in a completely decentralized way (now already made possible in a different way by Chainge decentralized escrow). While Fusion Time-locks and time-frames opens the possibility to trade with your future interest and to perform secure renting of NFTs or real world assets such as houses or cars tied to these. Chainge.finance has also showed very clearly how time-frames can help build futures and options market in a fuly decentralized way. Further Fusion owns an advanced interoperability solution DCRM that is currently uniting nearly all of crypto through the chainge.finance app, making it a very likely melting pot for all manners of crypto assets. Fusion's USANs and the chainge.finance user IDs also make it ideal as a main address point, since it makes it possible to keep all your crypto-assets under a very simple number or username instead of a complex HEX address (while the latter still works like always) [USAN and Chainge IDs are also noteworthy competition and a "people's alternative" to Etherum's super expensive ENS that can also work cross-chain]. Another advantage Fusion has over most Geth-forks (who are often PoA instead of PoS) is that it's more decentralized and open to any anonymous node, just like Ethereum. This should be a major benefit in terms of trust, especially as the network grows in value and becomes more and more decentralized by all manner of entities, who in no manner know one another.
If we are to worry about decentralization, then this is a major worry for chains that are spearheaded by a centralized exchange. Such chains will never be decentralized and will always be very dependent on the organization that put them into motion. Fusion does though have some disadvantage to these chains and that is that their highly connected to fiat gateways through their respective CEXs and that these chains have through their CEXs reputation been able to quickly build up their activity and liquidity in a very short time. But with Chainge the ready access to fiat gateways may also be coming directly to Fusion sooner than we think.
Fusion vs Solana, Elrond, Tron, Algorand, Cardano, Terra, Zilliqa, EOS, and other unique blockchains.
Though there may certainly be merit and great benefits with entirely new types of blockchains, they will always run into the issue of lacking full compatibility with what's being used the most historically (Ethereum). As such the most likely new big solution (if any) will more likely be an improved version of Ethereum. If a blockchain is too different, it will be more distanced from DeFi and will become reliant on more complex solutions to be able to interact with the rest of the space. Luckily Fusion's DCRM (through Chainge) and Multichain (formerly AnySwap which also came from Fusion) have been just the thing that can connect blockchains with different types of cryptographic signatures together into one. Thus Fusion can thrive in the popularization of other and new cryptographic systems.
Fusion vs Arbitrum other "true" layer 2 scaling of Ethereum
Fusion is a so called "Layer 1" solution. It's in no way dependent on the original Ethereum, but is fully compatible with it because it's been built from the same base. Layer 2 solutions are another approach to scalability which exist as a chain on-top of a chain. Though layer 2 solutions may be able to work fast and remain on-top of Ethereum there will always be cases of having to move back and forth to the base layer which effectively makes them useless simply because the base layer is too expensive and the layer 2 layers aren't really adopted or accepted by anyone at all. So far the adoption rate of layer 2 solutions hasn't at all picked up any speed and various institutions seem to prefer dealing only with layer 1 solutions. Perhaps this will change in the future and to an extent that may well be Ethereum's best hope of remaining relevant in a situation of constantly increasing gas prices. Food for thought here though is that Ethereum isn't the only layer 1 network that could have complimentary layer 2 solutions running on it. The same solutions could just as easily be applied to Fusion and other layer 1 solutions and since Fusion has unique functions built into its base layer, but might not be the fastest network of all, it actually becomes a very good candidate to eventually have layer 2 solutions of its own running on top. If we let imagination run a little wild: How about one for high speed transactions and another one for privacy?
Fusion vs Cosmos, Polkadot and other compatibility multichain interoperable solutions
Cosmos and Polkadot have a fundamentally different approach to projects like Fusion in terms of interoperability. To hook a blockchain into Cosmos that blockchain has to be reconfigured at its core as to become fully compatible. The situation is similar with Polkadot, except that they're less focused on reforming existing blockchains and more focused on making spinning up entirely new blockchains (that will be PolkaDot compatible) an easy and hassle free process. Neither of these projects however are truly seeking a solution to make all of crypto compatible. It's more a case of attracting projects that want to be compatible and help make them so. MPC type interoperable solutions like Fusion (Chainge)/Multichain, however, more seeks to hi-jack all of crypto and bring it into interoperability whether it wants to or not. You can read more about that interoperability here which becomes a form of decentralized custody, currently guarded by DCRM nodes but in the future the custody may well be decentralized by the Fusion network itself.
Fusion (and Chainge) vs MultiChain, WanChain, REN, ThorChain and other MPC interoperable solutions
Fusion was historically often compared with WanChain in particular as both projects came to be at around the same time and indeed have many things in common such as being forks of Ethereum, seeking to revolutionize the future of finance and also both have their own version of sMPC type interoperability in the form of decentralized custody. WanChain does though not have Fusion's QS, TL and USAN and are also lagging far behind in making crypto interoperability real. REN is somewhat a different beast altogether as it's a project that first and foremost focused on bringing interoperability to Ethereum and they were quite early in bringing BTC to Ethereum, however, they have been notably late to actually make their code public or to do anything more meaningful, while Fusion born MultiChain (formerly AnySwap) quite quickly piled achievement after achievement when it comes to advancing interoperability and bringing chains together. The race is likely to continue though and currently the two leading solutions are in fact MultiChain (now quite independent of Fusion) and Chainge which is planning to fully integrate with Fusion (Chainge already routes every cross-chain transaction through Fusion, but they also plan to eventually involve Fusion nodes in the decentralized custody). Chainge and Multichain seem to integrate new chains at around the same speed but each hold some clear advantages/disadvantages for its users. Multichain's main disadvatanage is that it's not as fast and is can also be quite expensive to use. It's advantage is that it can be used by anyone - even by those who wish to remain anonymous. Chainge advantage is that it's very fast to use and does not charge any high fee at all. It can also do advanced "cross-chain roaming" handling multiple cross-chain transactions of an asset that is meant to be the same thing all at once, without the user needing to concern themselves much about it. The disadvantage is that it's currently only available through the mobile application and only available to those with a Chainge user account. This has advantages too though, as this means it's not something criminals and hackers would be able to use, without taking a huge risk and also makes Fusion/Chainge likely to be seen as more "compliant" and mainstream than most other MPC solutions in existance.