Original title: (Ethereum Foundation Researcher: The golden age of Solana has ended! Two major advantages will be surpassed by ETH L2)
Written by: Ting, BlockTempo
In this bull market, the public chain Solana, with its advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees, captured most of the meme season's traffic, 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 had significant breakthroughs in its ecosystem recently, coupled with high gas fees, which has led on-chain users to avoid it, resulting in the continued sluggishness of 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: The golden age of Solana 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 terms of latency and throughput, stating bluntly that the golden age of Solana is coming to an 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 advantages lie in its stability, Lindy effect (historical durability), 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 well 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 the pre-confirmation mechanism will greatly 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 vigorous development of Layer 2. There is a website rollup.wtf that shows the growth of throughput from a computational perspective (measured by 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 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, the strategy adopted by Solana 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 basically reached its limit, making it impossible to significantly increase throughput. I believe Solana will not be able to increase 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 age, as its once-proud two performance indicators will no longer have competitive advantages.
Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted a tweet from The Defiant and attached a picture to indicate:
"The golden age of Solana has ended, and the era of multi-signature has arrived."
This tweet seems to carry a sarcastic tone, implying that the Ethereum Foundation lacks tangible results and can only use statements like 'Ethereum is about to surpass Solana' to motivate users and developers within its ecosystem. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem places great importance on multi-signature, account abstraction, and other technologies.)
Ethereum Foundation invests tens of millions of dollars into 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.
