Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently responded to the view that "Solana is becoming increasingly powerful and many believe it has already become Ethereum's most important competitor" in an interview with Foresight News, stating that Ethereum is actually more decentralized than Solana:
First, running Solana nodes is much more difficult than running Ethereum nodes.
Second, Solana's PoS consensus mechanism is more centralized.
Third, more things in the Solana community are directly supported by the Solana Foundation.
Vitalik: Ethereum is not the highest performance L1
Regarding his views, Vitalik first explained that Solana is more application-oriented:
They are very focused on applications, like to talk about DePIN, and the DePIN they do is in collaboration with some big companies, selling some hardware, and working with communication companies to create a new internet. These applications all have a characteristic that their demand for decentralization is much lower than Ethereum, and I think the market goals they are pursuing are really different from Ethereum.
Vitalik further pointed out that Ethereum is not the highest performance L1 in the market:
If you want the highest performance L1 in the market, Ethereum can never meet your requirements. You only have two choices, either go to other high-performance blockchains, or choose Ethereum L2, including Arbitrum, Base, etc.
However, Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum will remain a decentralized, neutral, and secure blockchain in the long run:
So what else can Ethereum do that other faster blockchains can't? I assure you that it will remain a decentralized, neutral, and highly secure blockchain in the long run.
Ethereum L1 is not the best place for high-performance applications... Ethereum's architecture is like this, decentralized, neutral, and secure, and Ethereum should be the only one that can rival Bitcoin.
Comparison of Ethereum and Solana token prices
Although Vitalik's statements do have their merits, whether they can be reflected in the token prices is another matter.
Since the current bull market, the performance of ETH has indeed not been as good as SOL. According to CoinGecko data, with the arrival of the bull market, Ethereum's token price has only increased by 55.6% in the past year, and by 19% in the past month.
On the Solana side, since the return from the bear market, its token price has risen 240% in the past year, and the increase in the past month has reached 37.5%, with the current token price exceeding $200.
Analyzing the reasons, Ethereum's ecosystem development has indeed slowed down in this bull market, coupled with L2 bleeding, whales and the Ethereum Foundation's continuous selling, investors' confidence in ETH has inevitably been affected; in contrast, Solana has seized the meme coin craze in this bull market, and its ecosystem has Saga phones, DePIN, token issuance platform Pump.fun, etc., which have brought multiple wealth creation effects for investors, naturally boosting its token price.
