Original title: (Ethereum Foundation researcher: The golden age of Solana is over! Two major advantages will be surpassed by ETH L2)
Written by: Ting, BlockTempo
In this bull market, the public chain Solana captured the majority of the meme season's traffic thanks to its advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees, and on November 22, the price of SOL tokens broke $260, setting a new historical high.
In contrast, the leading public chain Ethereum has not seen significant breakthroughs in ecological development recently, and the high gas fee issue has led on-chain users to avoid it, resulting in the continued sluggishness of Ethereum's token price.
However, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently stated that Solana's good days may be coming to an end.
Ethereum Foundation researcher: The golden age of Solana 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 terms of latency and throughput, and bluntly stated that the golden age of Solana is about to end:
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana: Each has different competitive focuses
Justin Drake:
To summarize this competition, it can be said that 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 in the past year or two in two key performance indicators: latency and throughput.
Solana's advantages are no more: 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 greatly 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, which means a 20-fold improvement in slot latency.
In terms of throughput, this year we have witnessed the thriving development of Layer 2. A website called rollup.wtf shows the growth of throughput from a computational perspective (measured in gas per second). Ethereum's goal is to allow the entire ecosystem to handle as many transactions as possible, and Layer 2 has already demonstrated its capability for horizontal scaling. 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 will not be able to increase its gas limits by 10 times next year, while Ethereum is very likely to expand its overall gas limits by 10 times through Layer 2.
In summary, we may soon see the end of Solana's golden age, 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 with an accompanying image, stating:
"The golden age of Solana has ended, and the era of multi-signatures has arrived."
This tweet seems to carry a mocking 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 such as multi-signatures and account abstraction)
The Ethereum Foundation has invested 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.
