In this bull market, the public chain Solana has captured most of the hype season traffic due to its fast transaction speed and low gas fees, with the SOL token price surpassing $260 on November 22, setting a new historical high.
In contrast, the first public chain Ethereum has not made significant breakthroughs in recent ecosystem development, coupled with high gas fees, causing on-chain users to avoid it, leading to a continuous slump in Ethereum's coin price.
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 about to 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 can surpass Solana in latency and throughput, bluntly stating that Solana's golden era is about to end.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana: Different focal points of competition
Justin Drake: If we were to summarize this competition, we could say: on one hand, Bitcoin's competitive advantages lie in its stability, Lindy effect (historical persistence), and currency properties; while Beam Chain focuses on maximizing Ethereum Layer 1's efficiency, making its competition with Bitcoin more direct. On the other hand, Solana is performance-centric.
In my model, Solana's competitors are 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 indicators over the past year or two: latency and throughput.
Solana's advantages are gone: latency and throughput
Justin Drake: In terms of latency, Solana has a very short slot time (time interval). However, for Ethereum, the arrival of pre-confirmation mechanisms will significantly improve latency, possibly even surpassing Solana. Currently, Solana's average latency is 200 milliseconds. But the pre-confirmation mechanism will reduce latency to nearly 10 milliseconds, meaning a 20-fold improvement in slot latency.
In terms of throughput, this year we have witnessed the vigorous development of Layer 2. A website rollup.wtf shows the growth of throughput from a computational perspective (measured in gas per second). Ethereum's goal is to enable the entire ecosystem to process as many transactions as possible, and Layer 2 has already demonstrated its horizontal scalability capabilities. Currently, the overall throughput of Layer 2 is 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 has been to concentrate all activities on a single server. Each validation node requires a large server to handle all activities, but the performance of these servers has basically reached its limit, making it impossible to significantly increase throughput. I believe Solana cannot increase its gas limit by ten times next year, while Ethereum is very likely to expand its overall gas limit by ten times through Layer 2.
In summary, we may soon see the end of Solana's golden era, as its once-proud two major performance indicators will no longer have a competitive advantage.
Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted The Defiant's tweet and attached an image, stating:
"The golden era of Solana has ended, and the era of multi-signatures has arrived."
This tweet seems to carry a mocking tone, suggesting that the Ethereum Foundation lacks real achievements, merely using statements like "Ethereum is about to surpass Solana" to motivate its ecosystem's users and developers. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem places great importance on multi-signatures, account abstraction, and other technologies)
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.
