ETH Foundation researcher proclaimed: The golden age of Solana has come to an end and will be surpassed by ETH L2.

In this bull run, the public blockchain Solana, with its fast transaction speed and low gas fees, has captured the majority of the traffic in the meme season, and on November 22nd, the price of SOL Token broke through $260, setting a new all-time high.

On the other hand, the first public chain Ethereum (ETH) has not made significant breakthroughs in its ecosystem development recently. Coupled with the issue of high gas fees, on-chain users have been avoiding it, leading to the continuous sluggishness of ETH’s token price.

However, ETH Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently suggested that Solana’s good days may be numbered.

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

The Defiant, an encryption media, tweeted today (29th) that in the latest podcast, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, discussed how Ethereum Layer2 can surpass Solana in terms of latency and throughput, and bluntly stated that Solana’s golden age is about to end.

BTC, ETH and Solana: Different competitive focuses

Justin Drake: If we were to summarize this competition, we can say the following: On one hand, BTC’s competitive advantage lies in its stability, Lindy effect (historical durability), and monetary properties; while Beam Chain focuses on maximizing the efficiency of the ETH network’s Layer 1, making its competition with BTC more direct. On the other hand, Solana is centered around performance.

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

Solana no longer has the advantage: latency and throughput

Justin Drake: In terms of latency, Solana has a very short slot time interval. However, for Ethereum, the arrival of pre-confirmations mechanism will greatly improve latency, even surpassing Solana. Currently, Solana has an average latency of 200 milliseconds. But with the pre-confirmations mechanism, latency will drop to nearly 10 milliseconds, which means there will be a 20-fold improvement in slot latency.

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

Meanwhile, Solana’s strategy is to concentrate all activity on a single server. Each validating Node requires a large server to process all activity, but the performance of these servers has basically reached its limit, so it cannot significantly increase throughput. I don’t think Solana can increase its gas limit by 10 times next year, while Ethereum is very likely to expand the overall gas limit by 10 times through Layer 2.

In summary, we may be about to see the end of Solana’s golden age, as its two proud performance indicators will no longer have a competitive advantage.

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

“The golden age of Solana has ended, and the era of multisignature has arrived.”

And this tweet seems to be sarcastic, suggesting that the Ethereum Foundation lacks practical achievements and only uses the statement “Ethereum is about to surpass Solana” to motivate users and developers within its ecosystem. (Note: The Ethereum ecosystem attaches great importance to technologies such as multisignature and account abstraction).

The Ethereum Foundation has invested tens of millions of dollars in zkVMs.

On the other hand, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, also tweeted today (29th) that the Ethereum Foundation is investing tens of millions of dollars in the zkVMs project, including zkRISC-V Formal Verification, Poseidon cryptographic analysis, and L2beat for zkVMs.