L1 Competitive Analysis: Ethereum vs. Polkadot vs. EmpoorioChain
A comparison limited to public, protocol-level facts — the only ones we can source.
| Ethereum | Polkadot | EmpoorioChain (testnet) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Framework | own client implementations | Substrate / Polkadot-SDK | Substrate / Polkadot-SDK |
| Block time | ~12 s | 6 s | 6 s (Aura) |
| Finality | ~13 min (2 epochs) | GRANDPA | GRANDPA, ~17 s p50 measured |
| Runtime upgrades | client releases | in-place WASM upgrade | in-place WASM upgrade (208 → 220 in two weeks) |
| Smart contracts | EVM | parachains / ink! | Frontier EVM on chain id 2026 + 140 native pallets |
| Validators | thousands | hundreds | 2 (one data centre) |
| Mainnet | yes | yes | no — see the mainnet gate |
What this note does not do: publish a throughput number for EmpoorioChain (unmeasured on production hardware), rate other chains' products, or compare fees across networks with different fee markets.