The Smart Contract Programming Language Showdown: Ethereum’s Solidity Versus Stacks’ Clarity
Ever since Ethereum introduced smart contracts in 2015, it quickly positioned itself as the go-to platform for decentralized application (dApp) developers. For many years, Ethereum’s smart contract capabilities have been the key drivers of the blockchain ecosystem’s emerging sectors like decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and gaming (GameFi).
However, in the last couple of years, utilizing Ethereum’s smart contract functionality has become increasingly difficult. Due to an ever-growing number of dApps and other smart contract-based projects on its network, the cost of transacting on the Ethereum network has surged higher as its throughput has decreased, leading to the rise of a wave of new smart contract platforms.
While many blockchain networks have attempted to emulate the smart contract mechanism, Stacks is one platform bringing smart contracts to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Read on to see how it compares to Ethereum.
Solidity Versus Clarity
Ethereum’s smart contracts are written using the Solidity programming language. Clarity, on the other hand, is the programming language used to create smart contracts on the Stacks 2.0 blockchain.
Solidity has been around for a long time and boasts a massive development ecosystem. By contrast, Clarity has been around for about a year now. That said, even though it is new, Clarity’s ecosystem is currently witnessing exponential growth.
Now that we have settled the basics, let’s compare the intricacies of Clarity smart contracts with Solidity smart contracts.
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Security
Solidity smart contracts harness the security features of the Ethereum Mainnet, while Clarity smart contracts on Stacks 2.0 benefit from Stacks’ ability to use the Bitcoin network as a secure settlement layer.
Contrary to layer-2 scaling solutions and sidechains for the Bitcoin network, Stacks provides a consensus algorithm between two independent blockchains - Stacks and Bitcoin in this case. This is made possible through Stacks’ PoX (Proof-of-Transfer) consensus mechanism. As a result, Clarity smart contracts leverage the Bitcoin network’s security and liquidity, while at the same time benefiting from Stacks’ high transaction speed and low gas costs.
In this context, Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is less secure compared to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW). This is mainly because PoS blockchains are gradually moving away from the core features of decentralization, which in turn is impacting security.
Since validators are selected based on their stake in the network, the PoS mechanism paves the way for centralized control where whales and institutions take over the network's security. This less decentralized reality can theoretically lower the threshold for hackers to take over the network (51% attacks and such).
PoX is not only more scalable than PoS, but it is also more secure and cost-efficient. Simply put, Clarity smart contracts combine the benefits of PoW’s security with PoS’ compatibility and then incorporate some more valuable features to make development activities more seamless.
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Throughput
The next aspect to look into is the settlement speed of smart contracts. Unlike Solidity smart contracts, Clarity smart contracts utilize Stack’s PoX consensus mechanism’s “microblocks” model to enable rapid transaction settlements without compromising security.
Conversely, Solidity smart contracts rely on Ethereum’s Mainnet, leading to slow settlement depending on the network congestion. In the case of layer-2 scaling solutions that facilitate Solidity smart contracts, the biggest concern is that these networks often compromise security and decentralization in the quest to deliver high TPS (transactions per second).
Clarity smart contracts deployed on Stacks 2.0 blockchain employ a different method than existing sidechains and layer-2 scaling solutions. They make use of their own nodes, network infrastructure, tokens, and miners while leveraging the Bitcoin network’s Mainnet to store all transactions. As a result, Clarity smart contracts demonstrably raise TPS while preserving the security of the smart contracts.
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Better Developer Experience
One of the most notable differences between both programming languages is that contracts written on Clarity are in a human-readable format. The smart contract code that gets deployed on the Stacks blockchain is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), thus obliterating compiler bugs.
Due to its design, Clarity allows developers and projects to predict the outcome of smart contracts alongside associated transaction costs. With Solidity, most of these characteristics remain under wraps, making it difficult for developers to predict (and prevent) any incorrect or inopportune outcomes. Compared to Solidity smart contracts, developers using Clarity have the option to plug their code into a sandbox environment to verify the desired outcome before deploying it.
This means that while Solidity programming language doesn’t allow developers to explore (and validate) all smart contract outcomes before deployment (without executing the code), Clarity enables developers to analyze all possible outcomes. This helps developers trace and remove any potential bugs before deploying the smart contract, thus saving a lot of time and future problems.
While Clarity might not be as flexible as Solidity, it is an interpreted language that doesn’t require any compiler. Unlike Solidity, the code created on Clarity gets automatically updated across all nodes on Stacks 2.0 blockchain, ensuring error-free compilation. In comparison, the source code of a Solidity smart contract isn’t published onto the Ethereum blockchain. Instead, only the compiled version is published, creating unnecessary complications in auditing the code.
Finally, Solidity is a highly object-oriented programming language while Clarity isn’t. Therefore, developers building smart contracts on Clarity can leverage unambiguous syntaxes to better predict how their code will perform once executed in actual scenarios. Simply put, Clarity smart contracts are simple and easily readable in their source form when viewed side-by-side with their Solidity counterparts.
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