EOS vs Ethereum vs Bitcoin: an honest speed and design comparison

8 min read

EOS vs Ethereum vs Bitcoin at a glance

People who search “EOS vs Ethereum” usually want one answer: is EOS faster, cheaper or better? The short version is that EOS wins on speed and user fees, Ethereum wins on ecosystem size and decentralization, and Bitcoin plays a different game altogether. The longer version is more interesting, because each chain made deliberate design choices.

Bitcoin launched as digital cash and settled into the role of a store of value. Ethereum turned blockchains into general-purpose computers. EOS arrived in 2018 promising to run those computers at web-app speed, without making every user pay a fee for every click. The network was renamed Vaulta in 2025 and its token is now called A, but the chain and its performance profile are unchanged.

Ethereum and Bitcoin figures come from Chainspect’s 100-block averages and protocol documentation. EOS capacity is our calculation from on-chain limits; the 2018 peak is a third-party report we could not verify.

EOS TPS: capacity versus reality

TPS (transactions per second) is the most abused number in crypto. During the 2017–2018 hype, EOS was routinely described as a chain that would handle “millions” of transactions per second. That never happened on mainnet, and you should be suspicious of any site that still repeats it.

Here’s how the real capacity is calculated. Each EOS block may use up to 200,000 microseconds of CPU time. The cheapest possible transaction is billed at 100 microseconds. That gives 2,000 transactions per block, and with two blocks per second you arrive at roughly 4,000 TPS. Real transactions are often heavier than the minimum, so practical capacity is lower.

Actual demand is a different story. When we sampled 120 blocks spread across about 25 minutes, the chain processed around 13 transactions per second (about 18 actions per second), much of it from automated contracts. EOS is nowhere near its ceiling. That’s good news for anyone who wants cheap, predictable transactions, and sobering news for anyone who equates speed with adoption.

Finality: how long until a payment is truly final?

Block time tells you how often a chain produces blocks. Finality tells you when a transaction can no longer be reversed, which is what an exchange, a merchant or a game server actually cares about.

• Bitcoin: finality is probabilistic. The common convention is to wait for six confirmations, about an hour, before treating a payment as settled.
• Ethereum: blocks are grouped into epochs of 32 slots. Full finality takes two epochs, or about 12.8 minutes.
• EOS (Vaulta): since the Savanna consensus upgrade on 25 September 2024, the 21 producers also act as finalizers and vote on every block. Once 15 of 21 agree, the block is final, typically in about 1 second. Before Savanna, EOS finality took around 3 minutes.

In practice, this means a transfer of 10 A to a friend on EOS is irreversible before you have finished putting your phone down. The background on that upgrade is on our Antelope and EOSIO page.

Fees: gas vs the EOS resource model

On Ethereum and Bitcoin, every transaction carries a fee paid to whoever includes it in a block. When the network is busy, fees rise, sometimes sharply. Users must keep the native coin in their wallet just to move other tokens.

EOS takes a different route. Instead of paying per transaction, an account needs three resources:

1. CPU, measured in microseconds of processing time, rented for 24 hours through a system called PowerUp.
2. NET, measured in bytes of bandwidth, also rented via PowerUp.
3. RAM, the on-chain storage for balances and contract data, which you buy and can later sell back.

A simple token transfer uses roughly 100–300 microseconds of CPU and about 150 bytes of NET. Renting that much costs less than the smallest unit the system charges (0.0001 A). Even better for newcomers, wallets like Anchor and many dApps cosign transactions and cover the resources for their users, so the experience feels free. The trade-off is complexity: if a wallet doesn’t handle resources for you, the error messages can be confusing. Our EOS RAM, CPU and NET guide walks through it with a calculator.

Consensus and decentralization

Bitcoin: proof of work

Miners compete to find blocks by spending electricity. Anyone with hardware can join. It is slow and energy-hungry by design, and that cost is exactly what makes rewriting history expensive.

Ethereum: proof of stake

Validators lock ETH and take turns proposing and attesting to blocks. The validator set is open to anyone who meets the staking requirement, which keeps the network widely distributed.

EOS: delegated proof of stake

Token holders vote for block producers, and only the top 21 produce blocks, each making 12 consecutive blocks (6 seconds) per turn. A small, known set of producers is what lets EOS run so quickly. It is also the main criticism: two of the current top 21 are run by exchanges, and protocol changes need only 15 producer signatures. Critics point to 2021, when producers used a multisig to stop Block.one’s token vesting, as proof that a small group can intervene on-chain. Read more on our EOS block producers and DPoS page.

Smart contracts and developer ecosystem

Ethereum’s Solidity ecosystem is the largest in crypto, with tooling like MetaMask, Hardhat and countless audited libraries. Bitcoin’s scripting is deliberately limited, and most programmability lives on side systems.

EOS contracts are written for the Antelope stack and run natively on the chain. To attract Ethereum developers, the community launched EOS EVM in April 2023, an Ethereum-compatible environment running as a contract inside EOS. Adoption stayed thin, and the EVM was shut down in October 2025; users were pointed to exSat’s XSAT EVM instead. Today you should think of Vaulta as a native Antelope chain, not an Ethereum-compatible one.

Size tells the rest of the story. DefiLlama tracked roughly $39M of total value locked on Vaulta when we checked, and most of that sits in the native REX staking pool rather than independent apps. Ethereum’s DeFi economy is many orders of magnitude larger. If you want to see what does run on EOS, browse our EOS dApps directory.

Supply and monetary policy

Bitcoin’s supply is capped at 21 million coins, with block rewards halving roughly every four years. Ethereum has no fixed maximum supply; its net issuance depends on staking rewards minus fees burned.

EOS started with 1 billion tokens and an inflationary model. In 2024, producers approved a hard cap of 2.1 billion tokens, cancelling most planned future emissions, and set the remaining issuance on a four-year halving schedule. The current continuous rate is about 3.6% a year and drops to about 1.8% on 1 June 2028. The details, including where those tokens go, are on our EOS tokenomics page.

Which chain fits which use case?

A chain can be technically excellent and still struggle commercially. EOS is the textbook example: its engineering has kept improving (Antelope, Savanna, a capped supply), while its price fell about 99% from the 2018 peak. If you’re weighing EOS as an investment, read our EOS price prediction scenarios and check the live EOS price before deciding anything.

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