In this bull market, the public chain Solana captured the majority of meme season traffic thanks to its advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees, and on November 22, the price of SOL tokens broke through $260, setting a new historical high.
In contrast, the leading public chain Ethereum has not made significant breakthroughs in its recent ecosystem development, coupled with high gas fee issues, causing on-chain users to stay away, resulting in Ethereum's token price continuing to languish.
However, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently stated that Solana's good days may soon come to an end.
Ethereum Foundation researcher: Solana's golden era is coming to an end
Crypto media The Defiant tweeted today (29th) that in the latest episode of the Podcast, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake discussed how Ethereum Layer 2 surpasses Solana in latency and throughput, stating that Solana's golden era is coming to an end:
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana: Each has different competitive focuses
Justin Drake:
If we were to summarize this competition, we could say: on one hand, Bitcoin's competitive advantage lies in its stability, Lindy effect (historical persistence), and monetary attributes; while Beam Chain focuses on maximizing the efficiency of Ethereum Layer 1, making its competition with Bitcoin more direct. On the other hand, Solana is centered around performance.
In my model, Solana's competitor is actually Ethereum's Layer 2, rather than Layer 1 itself. The good news for Solana is that it has performed excellently on two key performance metrics in the past couple of years: latency and throughput.
Solana's advantages are gone: Latency and throughput
Justin Drake:
In terms of latency, Solana has a very short slot time (interval). However, for Ethereum, the arrival of pre-confirmation mechanisms will significantly improve latency, even surpassing Solana. Currently, Solana's average latency is 200 milliseconds. But the pre-confirmation mechanism will reduce latency to close to 10 milliseconds, meaning there will be a 20-fold improvement in slot latency.
In terms of throughput, this year we have witnessed the vigorous development of Layer 2. A website called rollup.wtf showcases the growth of throughput from a computational perspective (measured in gas per second). Ethereum's goal is to allow the entire ecosystem to process as many transactions as possible, and Layer 2 has already demonstrated its horizontal scaling capability. Currently, the overall throughput of Layer 2 is already about 100 times higher than Ethereum Layer 1, and it is very likely to grow to 1000 times or even 10,000 times next year. This is a sustainable and scalable architecture.
Meanwhile, Solana's strategy is to concentrate all activities on a single server. Each validator node requires a large server to handle all activities, but the performance of these servers has basically reached its limits, making it impossible to significantly increase throughput. I believe Solana will not be able to raise its gas limit by 10 times next year, while Ethereum is very likely to expand its overall gas limit by 10 times through Layer 2.
In summary, we may soon see the end of Solana's golden era, as its once-proud two major performance metrics will no longer hold competitive advantages.
Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted The Defiant's tweet and attached an image to express:
The golden era of Solana has ended, and the era of multi-signatures has arrived.
This tweet seems to carry a sarcastic tone, implying that the Ethereum Foundation lacks tangible results and can only motivate its users and developers within its ecosystem with statements like 'Ethereum is about to surpass Solana.' (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem places great importance on technologies like multi-signatures and account abstraction.)
Ethereum Foundation invests tens of millions of dollars in zkVMs
On the other hand, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake also tweeted today (29th) that the Ethereum Foundation is investing tens of millions of dollars in zkVMs projects, including zkRISC-V formal verification, Poseidon cryptanalysis, and L2beat for zkVMs.
