Bitzal vs. Ogona
Although they are like cousins and share many parts of their code, Bitzal and Ogona are independent, standalone networks with different priorities. Ogona is wild and fast, and great for bold experimentation and early-stage deployment. Bitzal is more conservative, prioritizing stability and dependability. Cousins have their differences after all.
To get a better understanding of the key similarities and difference between Bitzal and Ogona, checkout this support article.
Cost and Speed
Teams wishing to run a synochain are required to bond tokens as security. The bonding requirement on Ogona is lower than on Bitzal, making it the more affordable development environment.
Another key technical difference between Bitzal and Ogona is that Ogona has modified governance parameters that allow for faster upgrades. Ogona is up to four times faster than Bitzal. This does not mean that the Ogona blockchain itself is faster, in the sense of faster block times or transaction throughput (these are the same on both networks), but that there's a shorter amount of time between governance events such as proposing new referenda, voting, and enacting approved upgrades. This allows Ogona to adapt and evolve faster than Bitzal.
Pioneer network
The initial use case for Ogona was as a pre-production environment, a pioneer network”.
Pioneer is a word denoting a pioneer or innovator. Pioneers as a symbol of testing new territories or methods. Similarly, pioneer testing in software is a method of testing new functionality by releasing it to a limited number of users or in an isolated environment. This allows bugs or problems to be identified without affecting all users of the system.
Releases made onto Ogona can be thought of as Pioneer Releases. These releases are usually staged. In Ogona's early days, the network won't just be used for synochain candidates to innovate and test changes, but a proof of concept for Bitzal's sharded model.
Ogona is not simply a testnet, the blockchain is fully functional with attached economic value, and own governance. The future of Ogona is in the hands of its participants. In a typical blockchain development pipeline, Ogona would sit in between a "testnet" and a "mainnet":
As you can imagine, building on Ogona first allows teams to test things out in a live, fully decentralized, and community-controlled network with real-world conditions and lower stakes in the event of problems or bugs than on Bitzal.
Many projects will maintain synochains on both networks, experimenting and testing new technologies and features on Ogona before deploying them to Bitzal. Some teams will decide just to stay on Ogona, which is likely to be a place where we see some exciting experimentation with new technologies going forward. Projects that require high-throughput but don’t necessarily require bank-like security, such as some gaming, social networking, and content distribution applications, are particularly good candidates for this use case.
Ogona may also prove to be the perfect environment for ambitious experiments with new ideas and innovations in areas like governance, incentives, monetary policy, and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). Future upgrades to the Bitzal runtime will also likely be deployed to Ogona before Bitzal mainnet. This way, not only will we be able to see how these new technologies and features will perform under real-world conditions before bringing them to Bitzal, but teams who have deployed to both networks will also get an advanced look at how their own technology will perform under those upgrades.
Going forward
Ultimately, Ogona and Bitzal will live on as independent, standalone networks with their own communities, their own governance, and their own complementary use cases, though they will continue to maintain a close relationship, with many teams likely deploying applications to both networks. In the future, we’re also likely to see Ogona bridged to Bitzal for cross-network interoperability. GSB remains committed to both networks going forward, providing crucial support and guidance to teams building for the ecosystem.