Ethereum Foundation researcher: Solana’s golden age is over

Author: Ting, BlockTempo

In this bull market, the public chain Solana relies on With the advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees, it dominates most of the traffic of the meme season craze. On November 22, the price of SOL token exceeded US$260, setting a new historical high.

Looking at Ethereum, the first public chain, there has been no significant breakthrough in recent ecological development. In addition, high gas fees have caused users on the chain to avoid it. As a result, the price of Ethereum continues to slump.

However, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, recently said that Solana’s good days may be coming to an end.

Ethereum Foundation researcher: Solana’s golden age is coming to an end

Crypto media The Defiant is at Today (29th) tweeted that in the latest Podcast, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake discussed how Ethereum Layer 2 surpassed Solana in terms of latency and throughput, and bluntly stated that Solana’s golden age is coming to an end:

Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana: Different focuses of competition

Justin Drake:

If you want to summarize this competition, you can say this: On the one hand, Bitcoin’s competitive advantages lie in its stability, Lindy effect (historical durability) and currency properties; while Beam The focus of Chain is to maximize the performance of Ethereum Layer 1, so it competes more directly with Bitcoin. Solana, on the other hand, is performance-focused.

In my model, Solana’s competitor is actually Ethereum’s Layer 2, not Layer 1 itself. The good news for Solana is that it has performed well over the past year or two on two key performance metrics: latency and throughput.

Solana advantage no longer: latency and throughput

Justin Drake:

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

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

Solana, meanwhile, has adopted a strategy of concentrating all activity on a single server. Each validator node requires a large server to handle all activity, but these servers are already maxed out and cannot significantly increase throughput. I don’t think Solana will be able to increase its gas limit 10x next year, while Ethereum will most likely expand its overall gas limit 10x through Layer 2.

In summary, we may be about to see the end of Solana's golden era, because the two major performance indicators it was once proud of will no longer have a competitive advantage. .

Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted The Defiant’s tweet with a picture:

"The golden age of Solana is over, and the era of multi-signature has arrived."

And this tweet seems to be sarcastic, Alluding to the lack of actual results of the Ethereum Foundation, it will only use the statement that "Ethereum is about to surpass Solana" to motivate users and developers in its ecosystem. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem attaches great importance to technologies such as multi-signature and account abstraction)

Ethereum Foundation invests in zkVMs Tens of millions of dollars

On the other hand, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake also tweeted today (29th) that the Ethereum Foundation is working on zkVMs Tens of millions of dollars have been invested in the project, which includes zkRISC-V formal verification, Poseidon cryptanalysis and L2beat for zkVMs.