In this latest bull market, the public chain Solana, with its advantages of fast transaction speed and low gas fees, has captured the majority of the traffic in the meme season, and on November 22, the SOL token price broke through $260, setting a new historical high.
In contrast, the first public chain Ethereum has not seen significant breakthroughs in its ecosystem development recently, coupled with the high gas fee problem, causing on-chain users to avoid it, and thus leading to the continued sluggishness of the Ethereum price.
However, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently stated that Solana's good days are likely to come to an end.
Ethereum Foundation Researcher: Solana's Golden Age is About to End
Crypto media The Defiant tweeted today (29th) that in the latest Podcast, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake discussed how Ethereum Layer2 can surpass Solana in terms of latency and throughput, and directly stated that Solana's golden age is about to end.
Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana: Different Competitive Focuses
Justin Drake: To summarize this competition, on the one hand, the competitive advantage of Bitcoin lies in its stability, Lindy effect (historical persistence) and monetary properties; while Beam Chain's focus is to maximize the efficiency of Ethereum Layer 1, so its competition with Bitcoin is more direct. On the other hand, Solana's core is performance.
In my mental 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 in two key performance metrics over the past one or two years: latency and throughput.
Solana's Advantages No Longer: Latency and Throughput
Justin Drake: In terms of latency, Solana has very short slot times (time intervals). However, for Ethereum, the arrival of the pre-confirmation mechanism will significantly improve latency, even surpassing Solana. Currently, Solana's average latency is 200 milliseconds. But the pre-confirmation mechanism will reduce latency to around 10 milliseconds, meaning a 20-fold improvement in slot latency.
In terms of throughput, we have witnessed the flourishing of Layer 2 this year. There is a website rollup.wtf that shows the growth in throughput from a computational perspective (measured by the amount of gas per second). Ethereum's goal is to have the entire ecosystem process as many transactions as possible, and Layer 2 has demonstrated its horizontal scaling capabilities. Currently, the overall throughput of Layer 2 is already about 100 times higher than Ethereum Layer 1, and it is very likely to grow to 1,000 times or even 10,000 times next year. This is a sustainable and scalable architecture.
At the same time, Solana's strategy is to concentrate all activities on a single server. Each validator node needs a large server to handle all the activities, but the performance of these servers has basically reached its limit, so throughput cannot be significantly improved. I don't think Solana will be able to increase its gas limit 10-fold next year, while Ethereum is likely to be able to expand its overall gas limit 10-fold through Layer 2.
In summary, we may soon see the end of Solana's golden age, as the two key performance metrics it once prided itself on will no longer have a competitive advantage.
Interestingly, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also quoted The Defiant's tweet and attached a chart, stating:
"Solana's golden age is over, the era of multi-signatures has arrived."
And this tweet seems to have a mocking tone, implying that the Ethereum Foundation lacks actual results and only uses the rhetoric of "Ethereum will soon surpass Solana" to motivate users and developers within its ecosystem. (Note: Ethereum ecosystem places great emphasis on multi-signature, account abstraction and other technologies)
Ethereum Foundation Invests Tens of Millions of Dollars in zkVMs
On the other hand, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake also tweeted today (29th) that the Ethereum Foundation is investing tens of millions of dollars in zkVMs projects, including formal verification of zkRISC-V, Poseidon cryptanalysis, and L2beat for zkVMs.
