Whilst being addressed by many developer teams, Ethereum’s ongoing scalability concerns are still seeing ERC20 tokens leaving, enticed by alternative cryptographic protocols that can facilitate a higher transaction throughput threshold. The latest of these cryptocurrencies is Hellofriend (CTT) (see: one-pager), with its project lead confirming on Wednesday that they recently left Ethereum (ETH) for Stellar (XLM) and their consensus protocol.

Appearing as a guest on Automata – a crypto podcast hosted by Daniel Cawrey (Co-Founder & CEO, Pactum) and Jon Southurst (Senior Editor, Bitsonline) – the chief executive of Hellofriend, Salman Habib, discussed various aspects of the blockchain startup that he co-founded alongside his brother Shaban Habib in late 2016.

When justifying the need for the Connect token (CTT), as opposed to fiat, and what protocol the native token for Hellofriend was running on, Habib revealed [@17:42] that:

We, early on, started as an ERC20 token, but because of scalability issues, we’re shifting to Stellar. It’s a Stellar token.”

When asked to elaborate on Hellofriend’s decision to leave Ethereum for Stellar, the Harvard alumnus provided [@19:16] a two-fold response:

[1] Speed:

The transaction time. If you look at Ethereum right now, the average confirmation time is somewhere around 3.5 minutes. For Stellar, the median transaction time is around five seconds.

[2] Cost:

There are no gas fees. The cost on Stellar network is a fraction of a cent, compared to Ethereum.”

Beyond relative comparisons, Habib went on to recite [@19:52] benefits of Stellar’s consensus protocol that ERC20 tokens cannot yet access:

Stellar also has a built-in distributed exchange, which would allow for HelloFriend users to transfer one currency with the another. This is something that Ethereum does not allow right now.”

It’ll be interesting to see how this bold decision impacts Hellofriend. Their ambitious mission to overhaul how people engage with social media (i.e., contributing to a connected world that suffers from isolation) is certainly making inroads, having emerged victorious at ‘Pitch2China @ Boston’ in late March. Consequently, Hellofriend have been invited to fly to China where they’ll speak with executives at Tencent, Alibaba, and JD.com.

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