Solana stake volume surpasses Ethereum, is the network security really higher?

Recently, there have been opinions suggesting that since the staking amount of Solana has surpassed that of Ethereum, it means that the security of the Solana network has exceeded that of Ethereum. However, this statement is somewhat misleading. Let's take a look at the actual situation.

First, let's look at some specific data:

• The staking amount of Ethereum is approximately 34M ETH, worth about 61 billion dollars.
• The stake amount of Solana is approximately 388M SOL, valued at about 5.87 billion USD.

From the data, Solana has indeed reached a level comparable to Ethereum. Considering that both of their PoS mechanism attack thresholds are around 33%, on the surface, the theoretical attack difficulty seems similar. A 33% stake can hinder block production, 51% can create a new longest chain, and 67% can directly carry out a double-spend attack.

However, in terms of practical operational difficulty, attacking Ethereum is far more challenging than attacking Solana. This is mainly reflected in two aspects: node centralization and the maturity of the staking infrastructure.

Node Concentration

Assuming a hacker successfully infiltrates the data center of a mainstream cloud service provider, to control over 50% of the stake in Solana, they would need to simultaneously control the top 43 nodes. While this is quite difficult, it is not entirely impossible.

In contrast, a single node on Ethereum can stake a maximum of 32 ETH, so it would require controlling over 1.18 million nodes to achieve the same effect, which is nearly an impossible task.

Even considering that an entity may operate multiple nodes, according to the currently recorded Ethereum node operator data, all registered operators together account for only 47.5% of the total stake, which does not even reach the 50% attack threshold.

The reason for this difference is that Ethereum, as an earlier public chain, has faced the threat of PoS attacks in reality, and therefore has made extensive preparations to guard against this potential risk, including measures to encourage retail investors to participate in stake.

The 32 ETH stake threshold for Ethereum is relatively low, while Solana has high requirements for servers, with monthly operating costs being 5-10 times that of Ethereum. This means that retail users of Solana need to stake at least 10,000 SOL to break even, and the yield may also be lower than that of large staking service providers.

The Maturity of Staking Infrastructure

The staking ecosystem of Ethereum, including projects like Lido Finance and Obol Collective, has done a lot of work to enhance network security.

For example, Lido requires its node operators to use niche cloud service providers as much as possible, rather than concentrating on mainstream large companies. At the same time, they also encourage the use of diversified client software instead of relying solely on mainstream clients. Additionally, Lido has also specifically allocated 4% of ETH to support distributed validator technology (DVT) infrastructure, such as Obol and SSV.

The DVT technology provided by Obol allows multiple participants to jointly manage a node. For example, a node can be set up to be co-managed by 4 people, requiring a 3/4 consensus to operate. This way, even if one node is offline, the other nodes can immediately take over. It is even possible to set up larger clusters, such as requiring a 7/10 consensus in a group of 10 people, which can tolerate up to 3 nodes being offline.

It is worth noting that on Ethereum and most PoS chains, nodes going offline is also regarded as a "malicious" act. If 33% of the nodes go offline, the entire network will become paralyzed.

The uniqueness of Obol lies in its implementation of a node cluster through a single client, which means that private keys (or their shards) are not uploaded to the blockchain, thus providing enhanced security. This is achieved through Distributed Key Generation (DKG) technology.

Currently, the Solana ecosystem does not have similar infrastructure specifically designed for staking.

Overall, although Solana and Ethereum have reached similar levels in terms of staking funds, Ethereum still holds a slight advantage in network security due to differences in node concentration and infrastructure maturity. However, this does not mean Solana is insecure; both networks maintain a high level of security. Over time, Solana's staking ecosystem is also expected to further improve and mature.