In this bull market, the public chain Solana relied on its advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees to dominate the majority of the traffic during the meme season. On November 22, the price of the SOL token exceeded $260, setting a new all-time high.
On the other hand, Ethereum, the first public chain, has not made any significant breakthroughs in its recent ecological development. Coupled with the high gas fee problem, users on the chain have avoided it, which has led to the continued slump in the price of Ethereum.
However, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, recently said that Solana’s good days may be over.
Ethereum Foundation researcher: The golden era of Solana is coming to an end
Crypto media The Defiant tweeted today (29th) that in the latest episode of their Podcast, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake discussed how Ethereum Layer 2 surpasses Solana in terms of latency and throughput, stating that the golden era of Solana is coming to an end:
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana: Different focuses of competition
Justin Drake:
To summarize this competition, it can be said: On one hand, Bitcoin's competitive advantages lie in its stability, Lindy effect (historical longevity), 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 focuses on performance.
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 excellently in the past year or two on two key performance metrics: 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, potentially 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 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 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 is likely to grow to 1000 times, or even 10,000 times next year. This is a sustainable and scalable architecture.
Meanwhile, the strategy Solana has taken 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 limits, making it impossible to significantly increase throughput. I believe Solana will not be able to increase its gas limit by 10 times next year, whereas 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 key performance metrics will no longer have a competitive advantage.
Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted The Defiant's tweet and attached a picture, stating:
"The golden era of Solana has ended, the era of multi-signatures has arrived."
And this tweet seems to carry a sarcastic tone, implying that the Ethereum Foundation lacks tangible results and only uses statements like 'Ethereum will soon surpass Solana' to motivate its users and developers within its ecosystem. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem places great importance on technologies like multi-signatures and account abstraction.)
The 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.
