Author: haotian
Some friends have suggested that I initiate a major "ETH vs SOL" debate, in order to clarify the true and false, the strong and the weak, through such a comparison. I directly refused this, for the following reasons:
1) Vertical discussion limited to Ethereum is not suitable for comparison with Solana
Initiating a discussion focused on Ethereum aims to deeply analyze Ethereum's past, present and future, and explore the problems in the current situation and possible solutions. It is a space for discussion similar to an "internal ideological enlightenment movement", with the intention of expressing "love is deep, responsibility is urgent".
Bringing Solana or other external forces into the comparison will distort this original intention and be easily misinterpreted by the outside world as a "black and white" smear. The cryptocurrency field is still a "dark forest", and no matter how objective and neutral, it will inevitably trigger conspiracy theories and biases.
2) The debate is difficult to be fair, and price expectations affect the evaluation
In the trend of "pumping is justice" and the theory of price, most people will simply judge Ethereum as the "loser" in a popular debate. The debate may seem objective, but it is actually an emotional release of the public's price expectations, and cannot achieve true fairness and justice.
3) Different ecological positions, forced comparison is unfair
The ecological positions of Ethereum and Solana are completely different, and a rigid comparison is not responsible.
Ethereum: It pioneered the paradigm of composable decentralized finance, carries the market expectation of disrupting Web2, has experienced two bull and bear cycles, has a mature DeFi ecosystem, has tried Non-Fungible Tokens, and is exploring the metaverse.
Solana: As a high-performance Alt-layer1 project, although it was once setback by the capital crisis of SBF, it has performed outstandingly in areas such as coin price, MEME market vitality, PayFi, and DePin.
Both have their own advantages, and if they are forcibly compared, the debate will become meaningless due to different biases and positions.
For example: Solana can attract users through its active MEME ecology, while Ethereum can refute that it has a more mature DeFi infrastructure. Such a comparison of different ecologies cannot produce a "winner".
4) The control of decentralized thinking is gradually weakening
Ethereum still continues the original "decentralized, free, open, and collaborative" ideology, but in the current increasingly complex commercial competition environment of Crypto, this ideology is gradually losing its control.
Even without considering "business expansion" projects like Solana, Ethereum's mainnet and layer2 also find it difficult to achieve unified development strategies. There is inevitably a contradiction between the "looseness" of decentralized organizations and the "efficiency" of commercial organizations.
The decentralized ideology is already showing signs of weakness in the face of the rapidly developing commercial environment. To truly realize the vision of Mass Adoption, a new cultural and organizational framework is needed to connect with ETF funds, compliance, off-chain assets and incremental users. Only in this way can the grand goal of cryptocurrencies be regained.
