Author: Joyce, Rhythm BlockBeats
Original article: "Solana and Ethereum are "quarreling". How can the community take sides? 》
On June 3, Bankless released a video "ETHEREUM VS. SOLANA: Which Blockchain Wins 2024 & Beyond?", inviting Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake to talk about their respective views on the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. the opinion of. This nearly two-hour debate, which came from the strong ecosystem of the crypto community, received a lot of attention in overseas communities.
The two most watched ecosystems in the encryption industry present their respective controversies in the form of direct dialogue between "representatives" in this video. Even ordinary community users who do not know the specific technical details can feel the differences between Ethereum and Ethereum. Solana’s “temperament difference.”
As community user Phoenixzen83 summarized, SOL stands for "Practical, Execution, Action-oriented, User Obsessed, Realist, Fail Early/Fast/Iterate/Improve/Push Boundaries/Find PMF, Application/Product Centric", ETH Stands for "academic, idealistic, rustic, rigorous at all edges, focused on infrastructure, slow and steady movement/battle-tested security."
Haseeb, founder of Dragonfly, Jimmy Skuros, vice president of product at Messari, etc. all forwarded and recommended this video. Tommy, founder of Delphi Digital, also made an AI summary for this video. The community also launched many derivative discussions around this debate.
In this article, BlockBeats has compiled video content and related discussions worth paying attention to in the community.
What topic was debated?
For the crypto community, the technical and ecological dispute between Ethereum and Solana has become a commonplace topic. But in this video, Bankless sets the discussion agenda into four links: "good, bad, ugly, and final." The two representatives successively elaborated on their optimistic views on the Ethereum and Solana ecology, pointed out the temporary and solvable shortcomings in the ecology, expressed their views on the flaws in the other ecology that are difficult to repair in the "ugly" session, and made a final decision "Concluding Statement" expresses the final vision of ecology.
「Good」：
1. Justin praised Solana’s high throughput, low fees, good user experience, wide adoption, and good financial performance, believing that it is part of healthy competition that can accelerate the development of Ethereum.
2. Anatoly praises Ethereum’s large-scale distributed node network and strong security guarantees, believing that it is better than the simple majority honesty assumption.
「Bad」：
1. Anatoly criticized Ethereum’s EVM design and the split between L1 and L2, arguing that this led to friction among developers and fragmentation of liquidity.
2. Justin believes that the short block time and low slot-to-ping ratio in Solana's design may lead to centralized timing attacks by validators.
「Ugly」：
1. Justin believes that Solana’s isolation as L1 from Ethereum’s network effects limits its potential.
2. Anatoly believes that Ethereum’s focus on “ultrasound money” makes it difficult to obtain value from execution/transaction fees.
「Final」：
1. Anatoly believes Solana will optimize hardware/bandwidth improvements to provide the fastest and cheapest global stateful applications.
2. Justin believes that Ethereum’s network effects and composability make it the dominant “Internet of Value,” while Solana has a small chance of surpassing its status.
Key points of debate:
1. Whether high token issuance or inflation will result in additional costs to the network or users, especially given that staking rewards may be subject to taxes. (Justin thinks so, Anatoly disagrees).
2. Regarding the importance of economic security in blockchain networks and the issue of 51% attack costs (Justin thinks this issue is critical, Anatoly thinks it is just a joke, calling it a "meme").
3. Solana’s low slot-to-ping ratio may lead to centralization risks in timing attacks (Justin thinks it will lead to centralization, Anatoly disagrees)
How does the community take sides?
Matthew Sigel, Head of Research at Van Eck (supporting Justin):
The winner was Justin, a tough win but a tough one nonetheless.
1. Economic security is no joke. Drake is right, financial security is important, and Toly is foolish to try to deny it. If 51% (or 66%) of the stake is controlled, a significant amount of locked value could be captured in an attack. Economic security is crucial.
2. Tax issues will indeed bring some selling pressure, because the tax obligations arising from staking rewards will cause holders to have to sell tokens to pay the tax. This is considered a cost of the network, just as miners use Bitcoin to pay for mining (such as the cost of electricity), this expenditure is also a cost.
3. The discussion about MEV’s short block times on Solana leading to more centralization is very interesting, but requires empirical discussion to get the data. We understand that Ethereum has 7,200 blocks per day, while Solana has 216,000 blocks. Each block is assigned sorting rights. Winning these blocks is easier if you are very close because you have the information advantage to get the "last say" in the block auction. In theory, this advantage only applies to transactions in the last part of the block, say 100 milliseconds.
For Solana, 1/4 of a block provides a latency advantage, while for Ethereum it is 1/120. Presumably, you have a better chance of getting latency-sensitive MEV because you have more blocks. This means that short block times give those with extremely low latency lots of opportunities to better reschedule blocks. This should be centralized because the best builder wins. This explains why MEV accounts for a larger proportion of SOL revenue than ETH in our model (68% vs. 38%). This is by design.
4. Justin mentioned that it is important that cryptocurrency is interdisciplinary and not just technology-oriented. Toly's approach is to simply build the fastest and best, and perhaps Solana's VMs can be deployed as L2.
5. Justin mentioned validators as decentralized orderers to enable MEV capture and fee capture for Ethereum. We’re not sure how L2 (and token holders) will agree on this. Additionally, cross-L2 compatibility will require all L2s to be migrated to ZK technology, which may take some time.
Eigenlayer founder Sreeram Kannan (neutral):
Both Justin and Toly are right, we still don't have good metrics.
1. Solana's shorter slot times do lead to less MEV (as Toly said); but also lead to more timing games (as Justin said).
2. Ethereum’s L2 roadmap bets on ETH as a “programmable decentralized currency” whose safe and usable areas cover all L2. Toly is right about this. But as Justin pointed out, sequence-based and real-time proofs can bring all value accumulation back to L1, based on the utility of synchronized combinations. Toly does not respond to this value proposition.
3. Regarding EVM and other virtual machines, the L2 roadmap is designed to remain neutral to virtual machines, as long as zk proves that it can be written in EVM.
4. In matters of economic security, both immediate security and vitality are necessary.
5. Toly seems to believe that liveness attacks are limited to MEV extraction. The total value of all lending markets, decentralized stablecoins, DEXs, fast options protocols, and more is at risk due to validator scrutiny. This is because the security of a DeFi protocol relies on the liveness of L1. Likewise, this is true for the Optimism Rollup. So for the economic security of these DeFi protocols, the total amount pledged should exceed the total amount on these protocols.
6. Regarding the issue of TVL vs. volume, both metrics are corrupted by reward chasing (the latter is easier).
Uniswap founder Hayden (neutral):
Props to Justin on the long term thinking and Toly on the short term application.
1. Agree with Justin, "Transaction demand will far exceed the levels we see today." Agree with Toly, “The biggest obstacle to Ethereum is the uncertainty of the long-term value of DA and the uncertainty about the vision of ‘Ultrasound Money’.”
2. Support Justin on network effects, research, and long-term thinking; support Toly on applications, engineering, and near-term thinking.
3. I have no opinion on the discussion of token issuance and cost. I feel that the debate there is more like a discussion about terms and definitions and does not involve substantive issues.
4. Of course, we need to expand the discussion in these two aspects. The seamless state machine of Ethereum and the single state machine of Solana are both worthy of attention.
Tesnor founder Richard (supports Anatoly):
To some extent, financial security is indeed a joke.
1. Anatoly (Solana) believes that the execution phase is the key to value accumulation. Good engineering design is more important than economic security, which may mask design problems.
2. Justin (Ethereum) believes that lightweight clients should be possible. In the end state, economic security does matter.
3. Agree with the view that "economic security is a joke" because in some cases measuring the security of a network by marking the inflationary Total Value Locked (TVL) as market value is not enough to make up for the poor quality of some projects. Token design or poor engineering. You can refer to the Terra project as an example. Inflationary TVL does not fully reflect the true value of the network.
4. But at the same time, if the external value on the PoS (Proof of Stake) chain far exceeds the holdings of the honest majority, then a "vitality attack" may occur, which is to attack by exploiting vulnerabilities in network activity. Although the external value on most PoS chains currently does not exceed the internal value, in some cases this may change.
Galaxy researcher Christine Kim (supporting Justin):
Lack of long-term thinking is why SOL can’t keep up with ETH’s valuation.
1. The MEV part is the most interesting to me, the question of whether edge validators can benefit from co-settlement is actually a centralizing force or a negligible one, even among ETH stakeholders are all trying to solve the problem.
2. I agree with Anatoly’s view that economic security is the “meme” of POS blockchain networks, and that aggregation-centric roadmaps will lead to fragmentation and low l1 revenue. But in my opinion, Justin Drake's final idea allows ETH to have the most compelling network effect, and is why Solana may never catch up to ETH's valuation.
3. After all, cryptocurrency valuations are rarely based on fundamentals.
Trader Vapor (Toly Supported)
Comparing Ethereum 20 years from now to Solana today is nothing more than wishful thinking.
1. Justin’s main arguments in favor of Ethereum remain TVL, brand, reputation and network effects. He advocates that "the Ethereum ecosystem is strong in quality, and the Solana ecosystem is strong in quantity." He believes that the market value of a single meme coin ($SHIB) on Ethereum is equivalent to the sum of the market values of all meme coins on Solana. Ethereum is a thriving and connected ecosystem, while Solana is a remote Pacific island closed to itself.
2. Justin talks about "synchronous composability" between Ethereum's millions of tps and L2 as if it's already done. Surprised at how weak the argument from one of Ethereum’s main developers is. None of these (reputation, brand, TVL) are moats, and comparing Ethereum 20 years from now to Solana today is nothing more than wishful thinking.
3. In fact, the value of Ethereum is being actively mined by the L2 sequencer on the execution side and the DA protocol on the DA side. L2 is a siled ecosystem that destroys the killer application of smart contract platforms, composability.
4. The only things left are memes like Ultrasound Money, ETFs, and the “legitimacy” of $ETH assets versus $BTC. That's still a lot, but none of it relies on technology per se, but part of it involves faith.
Video link
This article is reprinted with permission from BlockBeats
This Article The Fiery Ethereum vs. Solana Debate: Who Will Win the Future Blockchain Battle? First appeared in Zombit.
