ETH Foundation Researcher: Solana's golden age is over and will be surpassed by ETH L2

Original Title: ETH Foundation Researcher: The Golden Age of Solana is Over! Two Major Advantages Will Be Surpassed by ETH L2

Original author: Ting, BlockTempo

Source:

Compiled by Tom, Mars Financial

In this Bull Market, Solana, a public chain, has taken the majority of traffic in the meme season with the advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees. On November 22, the price of SOL Token broke through $260, setting a new historical high.

Looking at the first public chain Ethereum, there has been no significant breakthrough in its ecological development recently. Coupled with high gas fees, on-chain users have avoided it, leading to a continuous decline in the price of Ether.

However, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, recently stated that Solana's good days may come to an end.

ETH Foundation researcher: The golden age of Solana is about to end

Media outlet The Defiant tweeted today (29th) that in the latest episode of the podcast, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake discussed how Ethereum Layer2 surpasses Solana in terms of latency and throughput, and bluntly stated that Solana's golden age is coming to an end.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana: each with different competition focuses.

Justin Drake：

If we want to summarize this competition, we can say this: on the one hand, BTC's competitive advantage lies in its stability, Lindy effect (historical persistence), and monetary attributes; while Beam Chain focuses on maximizing the efficiency of the ETH Layer 1, so its competition with BTC is more direct. On the other hand, Solana focuses on performance.

In my model, the competitor of Solana 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 in the past year or two: latency and throughput.

Solana is no longer advantageous: latency and throughput

Justin Drake：

In terms of latency, Solana has a very short slot time interval. However, for Ethereum, the arrival of the pre-confirmations mechanism will significantly improve latency, even surpassing Solana. Currently, Solana's average latency is 200 milliseconds. But the pre-confirmations mechanism will reduce latency to nearly 10 milliseconds, meaning a 20-fold improvement in slot latency.

In terms of throughput, this year we have witnessed the thriving development of Layer 2. A website rollup.wtf shows that from a computational perspective (measured in gas per second), there is a rise in throughput. The goal of Ethereum is to enable the entire ecosystem to process as many transactions as possible, and Layer 2 has demonstrated its ability to horizontally scale. Currently, the overall throughput of Layer 2 is about 100 times higher than that of Ethereum's Layer 1, and it is very likely to rise to 1000 times, or even 10,000 times next year. This is a sustainable and scalable architecture.

Meanwhile, Solana's strategy is to concentrate all activity on a single server. Each validating Node requires a large server to handle all activity, but the performance of these servers has reached its limits, making it difficult to significantly increase throughput. I believe that 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 be witnessing the end of Solana's golden age, as its two performance indicators, which it used to take pride in, will no longer have a competitive advantage.

Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted a tweet from The Defiant and attached a picture:

The golden age of Solana has ended, and the era of multisignature has arrived.

This post seems to be sarcastic, implying that the Ethereum Foundation lacks practical results and only uses the statement 'Ethereum is about to surpass Solana' to motivate users and developers within its ecosystem. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem pays great attention to technologies such as multisignature and account abstraction)

The Ethereum Foundation has invested tens of millions of dollars in zkVMs.

On the other hand, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, also tweeted today (29th) that the Ethereum Foundation is investing tens of millions of dollars in the zkVMs project, including zkRISC-V Formal Verification, Poseidon cryptography analysis, and L2beat for zkVMs.