What is the difference between Ethereum and Eris?

Question

When I first searched for Turing complete blockchains towards the end of 2015 Google returned both Eris and Ethereum at the top. My initial impression was that they are quite distinct. More recently though I read that Eris is a spinoff. What exactly is their relationship, if any, and how do they compare?

score 12 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 13:01

Disclosure I'm the CEO of Eris Industries

eris is a blockchain application platform which normalizes many development activities when building a blockchain backed application. It is agnostic as to what the underlying blockchain technology; although admittedly when using some blockchain clients eris provides nominal value beyond configuring, starting and stopping (e.g., it doesn't currently allow you to, say, put an EVM over Zcash).

With respect to smart contract enabled chain clients eris provides a range of tooling beyond simply configuring, starting and stopping chain clients.

We do make a blockchain client as well, called eris:db. eris:db was the first to market with a permissionable blockchain design. It is a tendermint consensus engine connected to an application manager (which contains a permission layer) connected to a built to specification EVM. eris exposes a lot more tooling around eris:db (via the eris chains namespace) as permissionable chain clients have more complexity to properly work with.

We think that right now the EVM is the market leading smart contract interpreter and it is true that we have a range of tooling around the EVM.

I've answered more of the differences between geth and eris:db here.

Are there any examples of eris:db (with the terdermint consensus engine) running in production? — Randomblue, Mar 06 '16 at 12:19
Yes; although unfortunately the ones we know of are currently NDA'ed and the rest are in stealth. — Casey Kuhlman, Mar 06 '16 at 12:21
Not having a concrete public example is a barrier to entry for outsider developers/companies. For those not within the inner circles, NDAware and stealthware is basically vaporware. — Randomblue, Mar 06 '16 at 12:31

Ben Pearson · Answer 2 · 2016-02-05T17:28:15.940

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Eris is a services company that targets banks to deploy private blockchains. They employ Ethereum and have forked it but also seem to include some other technology and wrappers that provide additional tools for private companies to leverage blockchains. You can see a lot of Eris' git-hub projects are related to ethereum.

Here is Preston Byrne (Eris Co-founder, COO) talking about their view on blockchain and how private companies can use it.

This slideshare might also help distinguish them

edited Feb 05 '16 at 17:28

answered Feb 04 '16 at 22:23

Ben Pearson

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you can edit your answer to include additional information. – q9f Feb 05 '16 at 10:29

What is the difference between Ethereum and Eris?

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