Today we are going to discuss a topic. Yesterday, a friend in our group asked, "Teacher Zhu, why did you only give SOL a score of 3.5? Many friends in the group are optimistic about SOL, why don't you think it is good? Actually, I am not pessimistic, but I think SOL is not that good at present. I am not saying that SOL is bad. I think it may not reach the level of ETH. I will explain it from several aspects below.
1. The degree of technological innovation is not enough. Currently, the biggest highlight of SOL is its outstanding performance. The current TPS can reach a theoretical value of 6000, but the actual TPS you see on its browser is only a few hundred (the following is the data on the sol browser), but it is definitely much faster than eth’s 20-30.
Currently, the consensus of SOL is POH+POS (proof of space-time, please refer to the previous issue of SOL for details), while ETH uses POS. From a security perspective, SOL is more secure.
Then ETH appeared in 2015, and SOL appeared around 2020, so ETH was about 5 years earlier than SOL, but you have to know that ETH can bring smart contracts, making blockchain truly applicable.
As for the speed problem of SOL, eth actually has a solution at present, that is, the current Layer2, which can also reach hundreds of TPS.
Therefore, the innovation level of speed alone is not enough to bring about a huge leap in the world of blockchain.
2. Gap in ecological quantity
If the chain is compared to an operating system, then the ecology on the chain is all kinds of APPs. The more APPs there are, the more people will use your chain and the more valuable it will be. So why is the Windows system the largest now? Because there are too many applications on it, and the reason why others can't make a system is that you not only have to spend a lot of effort to make an operating system, you also need a large number of applications. At present, there are at least hundreds of thousands of applications on Windows, and then this will form a positive cycle. Because there are a large number of users, developers can make money by developing applications on it, which will attract more people to develop better applications on it. Only with better applications will there be more users to use it. So once this ecology is formed, it is difficult to break, and this business moat is almost invincible.
So why is Apple still the leader in the field of mobile operating systems? Because at the beginning, Apple had more applications than Android, so there were more good apps. When smartphones first became popular, I chose an Apple phone because it had more applications.
Currently, the most intuitive way to view is the dapp and TVL on the chain. Currently, eth has 1,128 protocols, while SOL has only 150. The data gap of DAPP is 7 times (and the order of magnitude of DAPP is the moat of the chain). The TVL of eth is 58 billion US dollars, and the TVL on SOL is 4.9 billion US dollars. The TVL gap is 11 times. But if you look at their market capitalization, ETH’s market capitalization is 400 billion), and SOL’s market capitalization is 76 billion, so the gap is only 5 times.
3. Developer Ecosystem
The above analysis mainly looks at the ecology of the chain. In fact, the final competition is whether there are people willing to develop it.
Whether it is Ethereum, SOL, or other chains, they all spend real money every year to stimulate development. The specific amount cannot be investigated, but we can look at this issue from another dimension.
First, let’s compare the development languages used by the two chains:
Solana smart contracts are primarily written in Rust and C. Solana provides a set of development tools and frameworks that enable developers to write, deploy, and execute smart contracts in these two languages. In addition, Solana also supports compiling other languages such as C++ and Go to the Solana executable format through the LLVM backend.
Ethereum’s smart contracts are mainly written in Solidity, which is mainly designed for writing smart contracts.
Rust and Solidity have their own characteristics in terms of syntax, features, application areas, and security. Then compare:
-- Rust
aim of design:
- Rust is a systems programming language designed to provide high performance and memory safety, with a special focus on concurrent programming and preventing common programming errors such as null pointer dereferences and data races.
Key Features:
- Memory Safety: Memory safety is ensured through the ownership system and borrow checker.
- High performance: performance close to C and C++, but provides better safety.
- Concurrent Programming: Supports efficient concurrent programming and uses the ownership system to prevent data contention.
- Rich ecosystem: has a large number of libraries and tools, such as the Cargo package manager.
Application scenarios:
- Operating systems, embedded systems, game engines, blockchain smart contracts (such as Solana), high-performance applications, etc.
-- Solidity
aim of design:
- Solidity is a smart contract programming language for the Ethereum blockchain, designed to simplify the writing and deployment of smart contracts.
Key Features:
- Contract-oriented: Designed specifically for smart contracts, it includes many contract-specific functions and libraries.
- High-level language: The syntax is similar to JavaScript, easy to learn and use.
- EVM compatible: The generated bytecode runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is tightly integrated with the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Security features: Some built-in security features are provided, but developers need to be careful to avoid common smart contract vulnerabilities.
Application scenarios:
- Smart contract development on the Ethereum blockchain, including decentralized applications (DApps), decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, NFT marketplaces, etc.
From the above comparison, we can see that Rust is indeed better in terms of security and high performance, but it has encountered obstacles in some aspects, resulting in its relatively low popularity, especially in China, where the Rust language is almost extinct, with no one using it and no company using it. Here are the main reasons:
1. Steep learning curve
Rust has a relatively steep learning curve, especially for developers who do not have a systems programming background. Rust's ownership and borrowing system, while providing excellent memory safety, requires developers to spend a lot of time and effort to understand and master it.
2. Ecosystem and toolchain
Although Rust's ecosystem is growing, the number and maturity of its libraries and tools are still lower than those of more mature programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, or Java. This can lead to a slow development experience.
3. Focus on the field
Rust's main application areas are system programming and high-performance applications, where the market demand is relatively small and specialized. In contrast, there is greater demand in areas such as web development and mobile development, which have their own more mature languages and frameworks (such as React and Angular in JavaScript, or Swift and Kotlin in mobile development).
4. Community size and support
While the Rust community is very active and highly skilled, its overall size is still small.
Therefore, compared to solidity, which is easier to get started with, rust is at a disadvantage in this regard. Currently, there are about 500,000 solidity developers worldwide, and 4 million rust developers worldwide (data queried on the website). However, these 4 million are rust developers who write all businesses worldwide, not just developers who write SOL contracts. A 1% ratio here is quite good.
Another data is the TVL comparison of development languages in the figure below. You can see that solidity ranks first with 140B dollars, while the second place is RUST 7.9B, which is also a gap of more than ten times.
Finally, if the number of your DAPPs depends on your developers, then ETH currently has the most developers, and the development language is also simple and easy to learn. From the inspiration of the WEB2 world, the number of applications determines the height of the moat. At present, SOL is difficult to beat ETH. Therefore, from the perspective of TPS improvement alone, SOL cannot become blockchain 3.0. Then who will it be? Please leave your answer in the comment area.
