Consider whether your use case benefits more from a customizable private chain or a shared public network. We utilized Avalanche's subnet feature to create a custom private chain for an enterprise partner with specific performance and compliance requirements, which matched those needs. When choosing a platform, evaluate compliance, performance, cost, tooling, and community support.
One piece of advice is to evaluate each chain as an ecosystem, not just from a technical perspective. Choose the chain that best fits your use case and users, not the one with the flashiest numbers. Developers should consider several factors when deciding which blockchain to build their app on, including tooling, infrastructure availability, developer community support, the presence of grants and accelerators, and the overall strength and adoption of the ecosystem. Other factors to consider include who is behind the chain (the foundational team), the transparency and responsiveness of the core team, token economics and incentive alignment, and how protocol changes are handled and governed. Additionally, developers should look at interoperability between Ethereum and other chains. One aspect that many developers overlook is geographic or regulatory exposure, which can affect long term viability. Some chains have regulatory compliance in specific regions that can help open the door to new users.
Q1: My top tip for developers leaving Ethereum is to think less about learning a new language syntax - be it Rust, Move or whatever fancy language comes next - and more about the execution model i.e. parallel versus sequential processing. Even though Ethereums EVM has become the de facto standard in the space and you can port most solidity contracts without changes, high performance chains like Solana or Aptos do require a change in mindset and way of handling state and concurrency (parallelism). The biggest mistake we see is developers who just try to port their synchronous logic in Solidity as-is to an asynchronous and parallel environment, and what inevitably happens is they end up creating either race condition or transactions that become bottlenecks, and lose out on a speed advantage. Q2: These three factors are key when looking at a non-Ethereum platform: 1. Time to Finality: Do not get easily distracted by marketing heavy "Transactions Per Second" (TPS) metrics. For enterprise grade applications it is of much greater importance to know how long there is until the transaction is actually irreversible than how many can be processed within some burst of finalization. 2. Tooling and Indexing Maturity: A chain is only as good as its debug suite and lookups. If a platform does not have access to an indexing service or mature SDKs, operational costs will blossom as your team spend more time building basic infrastructure than core features. 3. Governance and Regulatory Alignment: If this is a fintech type project or a supply chain and so on, the question must come up, does this chain's consensus and validator set adhere to standards like iso20022 and etc or does it fulfill some of the regulatory requirements of data privacy rules like GDPR etc. Choosing a blockchain is picking a long term relationship with that ecosystems particular properties and constraints, often times it is better to be on slightly slower and terribly documented network than on some ghost chain where you have to rewrite libraries for basic like block parsing.
If you move your interest from Ethereum to another network, act like you are choosing the main infrastructure for your business, and not a tech trend experiment. The platforms with the superior developer support and documentations, real-world usage (active wallets, transactions, dApps), reasonable fees, and an ironclad security record should be considered while YMMVing on the original chain's compatibility and language (can your team reuse skills?), ecosystem maturity (wallets, indexers, bridges, exchanges), and governance/regulation unless governance is an issue. Most important of all, make your architecture as transferable as possible between the chains, so if the ecosystem changes, you keep the power.
When looking at other ecosystems that do not use Ethereum, developers should ensure that they can use different platforms and that the development tools available with each platform are fully developed. Developers should also consider the difference between different Ethereum alternatives and Layer 1 alternatives based on throughput and latency since both of these metrics are critical for applications with fast cycles of development and the ability to deliver results to users quickly. Developers should look at how the consensus mechanism affects finality and how mature the SDKs are and, therefore, how they affect technical agility. A chain should offer seamless asset bridging. A vibrant, active chain repository supports long-term scalability of the repository and, therefore, support for developing and maintaining highly complex decentralized architectures.