This is a short version of my experience with Cardano and Ethereum development.
One of the major differences between Cardano and Ethereum is that Cardano uses the UTXO model where Ethereum uses the account model. You could compare Ethereum to a banking system. You have your account that you uses to send and receive money. It’s ONE single address for all. The UTXO model is based on having a wallet with multiple addresses. You don’t control (simplified) which addresses are used to send money. It depends on which UTXO can be used to collect the total amount.
Setup
Cardano
Installation and running a local development node of Cardano is a bit of a nightmare on Windows when compared to Ethereum and Bitcoin. I ended giving up and created a Linux VM ware instance that also included db_sync.
Ethereum
On Windows you just download Geth and setup up a few parameters and you are up and running. The same with Bitcoin and bitcoin clones.
Monitoring an address
At first I found that db_sync was a stupid addition not needed, but I have changed my mind. If you run a crypto service and need to monitor addresses you need a fast way to look up incoming transactions to an address.
In the Ethereum case you in principle need to start from the latest block (or the first block) and then get EACH transaction in each block looking for the address!!! That is NOT very effective. If you are the creator of the address you can store the blocknumber of when the address was created and just scan back to that number. Even better if you have scanned once you can store the starting blocknumber used. In that way you don’t need to scan the entire blockchain looking for new transactions since you can just start from where you started last. But that is exactly what the Cardano db_sync is doing. It stores the transactions so you can look them up OUTSIDE the blockchain in a SQL database (PostgressSQL).
So with Ethereum you need to make kind of a db_sync system yourself.
Apart from the complicated Cardano setup I prefer Cardano over Ethereum. If you run a crypto service the account based system also makes you end up with small amounts on accounts. You don’t have that problem with Cardano.
Cardano is the clear winner here.
