This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Gladys Tiffany
Let me pour you a coffee ☕ and tell you about my 3 AM coding nightmares trying to build the same damn dApp on both chains. This ain't your grandma's blockchain comparison - it's the raw, sleep-deprived truth you only learn through pain. 🤕
First Impressions That Totally Catfished Me 😒
When I first saw Avalanche's "Ethereum but faster!" pitch, I was like "Hell yeah! 🚀" Boy, was I naive...
- Avalanche's C-Chain promised EVM paradise 🌴 but delivered RPC endpoint roulette 🎰 (47 options and they all break differently)
- NEAR's weird account model confused me at first... until I realized I never had to explain 0x5FbDB231... again 🙌
Reality check: Both chains are like that hot Tinder date - great in theory, messy in practice. 💔
The "I Want to Quit Web3" Moments 😤
Avalanche's Special Brand of Torture
- Contract works flawlessly in Remix ✅
- Deploy to Avalanche... ✅
- "Reverted" with zero context ❌
- 6 hours later - turns out it was a gas estimation quirk 🤬
Meanwhile on NEAR:
- Error messages actually try to help (shocking! 😲)
- But then you realize "Wait... where's my comfy Ethers.js blanket? 🥶"
Subnets vs Shards: Pick Your Poison 💀
Avalanche: "Just launch your own subnet!"
- Fine print: You'll need 2,000 validators or sell a kidney 💸
NEAR: "We handle sharding magically!" ✨
- Hidden cost: Debugging cross-shard calls requires a PhD in distributed systems 🎓
Sh*t Nobody Warned Me About 🤯
- Wallet Wars 🔫
- Avalanche: "Just use MetaMask!" (said the outdated docs from 2021)
NEAR: "Here's our wallet!" (users look at you like you're speaking Elvish) 🧝
Dependency Hell 😈
Avalanche: NPM packages that actively hate each other 💔
NEAR: "You wanted a basic library? Check this unmaintained GitHub repo from 2019" 📜
The Works-on-My-Machine Lie 🤥
Avalanche testnet vs mainnet might as well be different blockchains 🌍
NEAR's sandbox is great until you need to test anything interesting 🧪
The Cold Hard Truth ❄️🔨
After wasting weeks of my life:
- Avalanche = Ethereum with cheaper gas and new creative ways to fail 🎨
- NEAR = Powerful but makes you relearn everything like some coding amnesia victim 🤕
The real answer? It doesn't matter as much as you think.
Your actual problems will be:
- Users who can't install wallets to save their lives 💀
- Gas fees that mysteriously spike right after you demo 🚀
- That one obscure bug that only happens on Tuesdays 📅
Pick one and build. The chain won't be your biggest headache - people will be. 😂
Still stuck choosing?
- Want familiar but janky? Avalanche 🏗️
- Want powerful but undocumented? NEAR 🦸
Either way... welcome to Web3 hell 🔥 We have cookies 🍪 (but they're NFT-gated)
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Gladys Tiffany
Gladys Tiffany | Sciencx (2025-08-09T16:07:44+00:00) NEAR vs. Avalanche: A Developer’s War Story 🧑💻🔥. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/09/near-vs-avalanche-a-developers-war-story-%f0%9f%a7%91%f0%9f%92%bb%f0%9f%94%a5/
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