Solana Could Flip Ethereum in Transaction Fees Within a Week: Report
The Solana network could be on track to overtake the Ethereum network in transaction fees, a potentially significant development for Solanaâs status as a so-called âEthereum-killer.â
Solana could flip Ethereumâs transaction fees as soon as this week, according to Dan Smith, senior research analyst at Blockworks, who wrote in a May 7 X post:
âSolana will flip Ethereum in transaction fees + captured MEV this month, maybe even this week.â
Captured MEV, or Maximal Extractable Value, refers to profits that are mostly captured through arbitrage trading on the protocols. MEV measures the maximum amount of value that can be extracted from a blockchain by a user or a group of users.
Moreover, Solanaâs $2.8 million total economic value was near Ethereumâs $3.1 million total economic value on May 7, according to Smithâs X post:
âDefining âtotal economic valueâ (shill me better names) as total transaction fees + captured MEV returned to validators. Yesterday, Ethereum: $3,165,772, Solana: $2,803,313.â
Total Economic Value, Solana, and Ethereum. Source: Dan Smith
However, Solanaâs daily transaction fees are still far from Ethereumâs. Ethereum generated over $2.75 million worth of fees in the past 24 hours, compared to Solanaâs $1.49 million, according to DefiLlama data.
Solana and Ethereum TVL. Source: DefiLlama
Looking at the total value locked (TVL), Solanaâs $3.94 billion TVL is still a small fraction, or around 7.4% of the Ethereum networkâs over $53 billion TVL.
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Is Solana really an âEthereum killerâ?
Solana launched on mainnet in March 2020, with a claimed throughput of 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), promising to improve on the lack of scalability and inefficiencies of Ethereum, as a so-called âEthereum-killer.â
Unlike Ethereumâs modular approach to scalability via layer-2 (L2) scaling solutions, Solanaâs monolithic approach aims to create scalability and low fees as a standalone blockchain network.
However, Solanaâs approach saw widespread criticism following its previous outages. At the beginning of April, the demand for memecoins caused approximately 75% of Solana transactions to fail, as the network was unable to handle the large demand.
On Feb. 6, block production on Solana stopped for approximately five hours, before engineers and validators were able to restart the network, according to Solanaâs status page.
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