Is it possible for Solana to surpass ETH?
If a blockchain’s primary goal is to have low fees, then the value of its token cannot come from transaction fees alone. Contrast this to Ethereum, where the value growth comes from users paying (and partially destroying) ETH on every transaction, making it expensive for users but beneficial for those who hold ETH.
On the other hand, in order to ensure the security of a blockchain, some form of value proposition is required. How does Solana solve this problem? Charge state rent to decentralized application (DApps) teams. Charge voting fees to validators, which validators must pay to participate in voting on blocks. Leaving token economics aside, there is also an oft-noted issue with Solana’s performance validator hardware requirements… However, despite the ETH maxis’ slamming this, this is not a “centralization” issue — Solana validators are decentralized (Satoshi-like coefficient).
There is also the question of how smart contracts work on Solana and the centralization/trust issues that come with that…Solana contracts work on a literal on-chain inheritance structure, e.g. all NFTs are sub-contracts of a master NFT contract controlled by a Metaplex multisig. With all these aspects, it would be a huge mistake to say that Solana is less “decentralized” than Ethereum etc… It’s not a question of decentralization… but rather, it’s a question of autonomy, which is a question of censorship resistance.
While Ethereum achieves immutability, autonomy, and censorship resistance, at least in theory, and charges users a high premium accordingly, Solana is cheap, and it passes the security costs on to validators and DApp providers.
So, in general, Solana DApps will have a harder time getting trust minimization from their teams (impacting autonomy), and in theory, the economies of scale of Solana validators should at least be greater than Ethereum validators (decentralization). So if you believe that the USP of a blockchain is censorship resistance/autonomy, then ETH is still a better choice than SOL because it is better suited to the unique purpose of blockchains.
Although there are many reasons above, it does not affect the low position of the ETH copycat leader