Yoav Vilner, a startup mentor for Microsoft and Google-led “accelerator” projects and a blockchain technology blogger, recently published an article on Forbes in which he claims that Qtum’s open-source “hybrid” distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform may be “the next phase of blockchain.”

Qtum, Tron To Compete With Ethereum

He argued that Qtum’s recently released x86 virtual machine (VM) will provide a much better “value proposition” compared to Ethereum. He explained that Qtum’s VM allows developers to contribute code and applications by being able to use a broader range of programming languages.

Notably, several other blockchain-based platforms developed after Ethereum, which also allow users to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) and utilize smart contracts, have given developers the option of coding in languages they’re more familiar with.

For instance, the Tron (TRX) platform lets users contribute code in the widely-used Java programming language. Ethereum, however, has its own programming language called Solidity which many programmers have never learned to use.

In addition to allowing developers to have more coding options, Vilner noted that Qtum supports segregated witness (SegWit) – which separates transaction signature data from the actual transaction data for more efficient, or faster, processing.

Qtum will also be able to use the Lightning Network (LN) (a second-layer payment solution designed for blockchains to enable faster transactions), Vilner wrote. He then mentioned that Qtum’s developers will launch QtumX in 2019.

As described in a Medium blog post by Qtum’s development team, QtumX is designed to be the enterprise version of the smart contract platform that may be used by large corporations as it is said to have great “stability, and could widely increase exchange efficiency and guarantee the safety of the network at the same time.”

However, Qtum’s products and services have not yet been thoroughly tested and whether they will actually be better than what Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) offer remains to be seen.

According to Vilner, who’s also a CNBC contributor, the controversial Justin Sun-backed Tron platform, which aims to provide a decentralized online content management network, will transform how content producers and content consumers interact and transact.

Tron May Be Centralized

Vilner further claims that Tron’s acquisition of Bittorrent and Project Atlas, which reportedly aims to connect Bittorrent’s peer-to-peer (P2P) to Tron’s blockchain platform, will help Tron become “one of the largest decentralized networks in the world.”

A closer examination, however, reveals that Tron’s governance model requires appointing 27 block producers, or transaction validators. This means that only these 27 “masternodes” or “supernodes” control many of the actions that may take place on the Tron network.

As CryptoGlobe covered, the EOS platform uses a similar governance model in which 21 block producers (BPs) are selected by the crypto’s community to validate blocks on its network. This has reportedly created serious issues as the BPs have allegedly been “colluding” and many consider EOS to be highly centralized, instead of decentralized and democratic as it claims.