*3.2. Ethereum*

Ethereum was selected as the blockchain for the proposed method, which brings several advantages to the system. Although in terms of popularity, Ethereum loses first position to Bitcoin, it still has some very exclusive features that make it a popular choice for industries. The most relevant feature of Ethereum is the smart contract [41], which makes it a digital asset management system rather than just a money transfer system. Due to smart contracts, it is possible to manage the full system by using one platform, which is not possible for other types of blockchain, such as Bitcoin, Zcash, Dash, Peercoin, Ripple, Monero, and Multichain.

Ethereum supports more transactions per second than most of the other blockchains; again, Ethereum does not have any coin limit. On the other hand, while most of the blockchains support the latest scripting language by Bitcoin called Bitcoin Script [42], Ethereum supports multiple languages that are similar to the most popular languages. Examples include Solidity, which is similar to Java Script and C; Serpent, which is similar to Python; and LLL, which is similar to Lisp. Table 1 shows the advantages of using Ethereum over other blockchains.

**Table 1.** Comparison of the Ethereum blockchain with others.


<sup>1</sup> TPS = transactions per second. <sup>2</sup> SC = smart contract.
