If you’ve been exploring the myriad of blockchain platforms on this planet, you might encounter these three terms.
What Are They And Why We Need Them?
Broadly speaking, they are features that allow you to run your own “little” blockchain on top of each particular blockchain.
You see, the issue with blockchain is scalability. That’s why you and I are paying our asses off when we are using Ethereum because everyone’s pushing to store or validate their data on each block and it could only support a limited amount of transactions per second (like 21 TPS). The miners feel since they only could validate so few transactions at a time, they deserve to be paid more so they pick to process transactions that are willing to pay more gas fees versus those with cheap gas fees. The amount of this fee is usually painful to bear due to this bottleneck.
Moreover, many experts feel that we can’t truly scale a blockchain to kingdom come with just one single chain, regardless of whatever complexity one throws into it. Thus, the other logical alternative is to split into multiple chains.
So, these subchains are like little blockchains that sit on top of the parent or mother chain, if you will.
So, instead of everyone trying to get mother to work, each has their own little chain to use.
I hope this explains it in a layman's way. I’ve cherry-picked some easy-to-understand links above that point to more details on how each mini-chain is different than the other.
Which Is Best?
Your guess is as good as mine. Each of them does come with its own bells and whistles, some subchains include a consensus layer while some don’t and some have different types of subchains — privacy and EVM minichains. Moonbeam, for instance, is an EVM for Polkadot network built on parachain. This means it allows you to run your Solidity smart contract on Polkadot.
I’ve yet to find time to dig deep into each of them but I’d say it depends on what dapp you wish to build.
If you’ve used any of the parallel chains we discussed, please share your experience in the comments below.
Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated with any of the blockchain platforms mentioned.