Original title: Ethereum Foundation Researcher: Solana's Golden Era is Over! Two Major Advantages Will Be Surpassed by ETH L2
Original Author: Ting, BlockTempo
Original source: https://www.blocktempo.com/ethereum-foundation-researcher-solanas-golden-era-may-be-coming-to-an-end/
Compiled by: Tom, Mars Finance
In this round of the bull market, the public chain Solana has captured a significant portion of the meme season's traffic due to its advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees, and on November 22, the price of SOL tokens broke through 260 USD, setting a new historical high.
In contrast, the first public chain, Ethereum, has not seen significant breakthroughs in recent ecosystem development, coupled with high gas fees, leading on-chain users to avoid it, resulting in a continued slump in Ethereum's coin price.
However, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently stated that Solana's good days may be coming to an end.
Ethereum Foundation researcher: Solana's golden era is about to end.
Crypto media The Defiant tweeted today (29) that in the latest episode of the Podcast, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake discussed how Ethereum Layer 2 surpasses Solana in terms of latency and throughput, bluntly stating that Solana's golden era is about to end:
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana: The competitive focus differs.
Justin Drake:
To summarize this competition, one could say: on one hand, Bitcoin's competitive advantage lies in its stability, Lindy effect (historical persistence), and monetary properties; 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 performance-centric.
In my model, Solana's competitor is actually Ethereum's Layer 2, not Layer 1 itself. The good news for Solana is that it has performed exceptionally well on its two key performance metrics—latency and throughput—in the past year or two.
Solana's Advantages Are No More: Latency and Throughput
Justin Drake:
In terms of latency, Solana has a very short slot time (interval). However, for Ethereum, the arrival of the pre-confirmation mechanism will significantly improve latency, even surpassing Solana. Currently, Solana's average latency is 200 milliseconds. But the pre-confirmation mechanism will reduce latency to nearly 10 milliseconds, meaning there will be a 20-fold improvement in slot latency.
In terms of throughput, this year we have witnessed the flourishing development of Layer 2. A website rollup.wtf shows the growth of throughput from a computational perspective (measured by the number of gas per second). Ethereum's goal is to have the entire ecosystem handle as many transactions as possible, and Layer 2 has already demonstrated its horizontal scaling capabilities. Currently, the overall throughput of Layer 2 is about 100 times higher than Ethereum Layer 1, and it may increase 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 validation node requires a large server to handle all activities, but the performance of these servers has essentially reached its limits, making it difficult to significantly increase throughput. I believe Solana will not be able to raise its gas limit by 10 times next year, while Ethereum is 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 performance metrics will no longer hold a competitive advantage.
Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted a tweet from The Defiant and attached a picture to express:
Solana's golden era 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 only uses statements like 'Ethereum is about to surpass Solana' to motivate its users and developers within the ecosystem. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem places great importance on technologies like multi-signature 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 (29) that the Ethereum Foundation is investing tens of millions of dollars in zkVM projects, including zkRISC-V formal verification, Poseidon cryptanalysis, and L2beat for zkVMs.
