Solana Co-founder: Solana’s strategic priorities include building a strong L1 chain and achieving synchronous composability

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko spoke in a recent interview about the ecosystem’s unique position in the blockchain space and contrasted its deployment with L2 scaling solutions and other L1 blockchain systems. Previously, he raised the question of what the vitality of the Ethereum ecosystem would be like without the contribution of L2 solution Base. The question was raised while observing Base’s growth metrics, especially in terms of user activity and transaction volume. “In my opinion, scalability, infrastructure focus, and transaction efficiency are the three main strengths of Solana,” Yakovenko elaborated, recognizing the challenges Solana faces in the context of the continuous evolution of blockchain technology and further development of the platform. Yakovenko highlighted Solana’s unique architecture, which aims to democratize access to transaction validation. Unlike traditional finance, Solana allows anyone to set up a validator and submit transactions directly, bypassing intermediaries. This level of decentralization is difficult to replicate for traditional finance. While the functionality exists, he also admitted that it remains a challenge to scale it effectively. Yakovenko compared Solana to Ethereum and various L2 solutions, highlighting the trade-offs between L1 and L2. L2 solutions often use centralized sorters for low-latency transaction ordering. However, these can cause the same congestion issues as L1 chains. While L2s are often seen as a short-term solution to congestion, they face scaling bottlenecks when multiple applications or markets use them. He emphasized that Solana’s strategic focus is on building a strong L1 chain that is able to support high throughput without the need for L2 solutions. Another key factor is synchronous composability, where multiple applications can interact in real time on a single chain. He believes this is critical for DeFi, and monolithic chains or application-specific L2s cannot support this level of composability, limiting scalability. Yakovenko believes that Solana’s last competitive advantage lies precisely in this: it is fully committed to large-scale synchronous composability, which makes it different from Ethereum and L2 chains. He also claimed that Solana’s advantage lies in execution. While Ethereum is scaling through L2, Solana’s development is still focused on making its L1 perfect. He acknowledged that one day, blockchains will offer similar functionality to Solana and provide faster iterations, but for now, the pace of Solana's improvements puts it far ahead of its competitors. Yakovenko noted that the core of Solana's potential lies in perfecting its infrastructure to support fairer and more open transaction processing for a truly decentralized future, which will make Solana one of the leading blockchains in the coming years. (GoinGape)