It’s hard to come up with what to write when completely nothing happens in the field. Usually I come up with ideas for articles when reading someone else’s materials. For example, I made “Rollup interoperability“ after reading about Chainlink CCIP, and “How we can use Ethereum to fight corruption“ after reading specs of yet another country’s CBDC. I could write something about war in middle east but in the world where everyone talks about it, who would want to read even more about it in the crypto-related platform?..

So I’ll discuss the first thing that appeared in my twitter wall - Placeholder VC’s “Ethereum and Solana“ article. While in this article Ethereum and Solana are compared to iOS and Android and the whole point is quite abstract, I’ll talk about the main difference between them, not technical, but somewhat ideological.

The competition of most L1s comes down to solving blockchain trilemma. Blockchain trilemma says that there are three main characteristics of blockchains - security, scalability, and decentralisation. All modern blockchain systems can only have two of them, and we need to solve all three to make web3 happen.

As decentralisation is quite abstract metric, I’d change it here to Security (how much does it cost to hack the network and to recover from hacks) - Scalability - Users’ power (how many things in the network depend on ordinary users)

It’s worth noting that by power I don’t mean harmful actions of any specific person, but collective network management - in other words, how many things user community can control and change themselves if needed?

Different views on this factor, in fact, lead us to different scaling methods:

Ethereum

We can shortly define Ethereum’s scaling strategy as trying to squeeze out as much TPS as possible from Ethereum, while keeping node requirements at the level of home PCs and microcomputers not exceeding price of 100-200$ + consumer-grade SSDs.

By philosophy of Ethereum community, a real decentralised system must be possible to run by everyone, and only with this approach people can make worldwide computer compete with existing web2 world. It’s obvious that this approach imposes many difficulties to scalability that the community has been solving for a long time. In fact, all development in the Ethereum since its launch comes down to making the system more scalable while not increasing node requirements.
We can’t say that Ethereum community is done and they probably won’t be done for years, but right now they’re quite close to significant changes. Specifically, upcoming EIP-4844 update will increase bandwith in tens of times for rollups that already handle 5x TPS of Ethereum L1. This is the first significant step in solving this hard task of Ethereum philosophy.

Solana

Solana philosophy, in turn, says that technology is developing, and we should use it to the fullest. Solana node requirements are quite close to the power limit of modern server computers and the whole system is designed in the way that unnecessary load is stripped off. Needless to say that it’s impossible to run a node at home or on the average hardware, only the most powerful servers in large datacenters can handle the load.
Solana community believes that it’s completely fine if nodes are mostly run by projects on top of Solana, RPC providers etc, because they are also somewhat run by the community. In this view Ethereum vs Solana philosophy is quite close to 2017-era Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash philosophy.

This similarity is even reflected in the areas of development. It’s hard to say that now Bitcoin is developed at all, but in this 2017-era Bitcoin community was thinking how to scale the network keeping node requirements around microcomputer level (SegWit, Lightning, etc.), while Bitcoin Cash community was (and is) thinking how to use modern tech possibilities as efficient as possible (Xthinner, UTXO Fastsync, etc).

In case of Ethereum and Solana, Ethereum community is mostly working on ZK cryptography in rollups and Ethereum L1 itself, distributed provable storage via Danksharding - in short, technologies that help with scaling while keeping hardware requirements same. Solana community, in turn, mostly works on optimising its protocol. For example, Jump Crypto team develops Firedancer node client which is written entirely in C with Assembly and uses various memory and cryptography hacks for maximal client optimisation. It will allow protocol to work faster on modern professional-grade tech.

I consider it as the main difference between Ethereum and Solana.

A year or two ago it would be fair to simplify Ethereum vs Solana tech to decentralised vs centralised. However, if we look at the current state objectively, neither projects have single point of failure or controlled by anyone. Yes, it’s definitely simpler to control Solana than Ethereum, Solana is way more dependent on current state of tech and less “apocalypse-resistant“ than Ethereum, former also has some controversial design decisions in order to implement its view e.g leader mechanism, but I would say that now Ethereum vs Solana philosophy is something more complex than decentralised vs centralised, people vs companies, proletariat vs bourgeois (sic!), etc etc.
This leads to the fact that we can’t objectively say which approach is better. It depends on your opinion and life views, what you consider as web3 more.

What about me?

My views are closer to Ethereum philosophy. I very appreciate possibility of participating in the worldwide network even if you’re not running a commercial project or can’t afford renting a powerful server on your own. I also believe that trying to solve the main Ethereum challenge can lead to many scientific discoveries even outside the crypto space. I’m eager to help with difficulties that Ethereum community meets on its way, although I can’t say that I’m doing anything significant right now. :-)

The future will probably show who’s right. While we wait for the future, I’d like to hear your opinion about it. Mirror does not have comments, so you can comment in the posts with my article pinned.

Thanks for reading.

It’s hard to come up with what to write when completely nothing happens in the field. Usually I come up with ideas for articles when reading someone else’s materials. For example, I made “Rollup interoperability“ after reading about Chainlink CCIP, and “How we can use Ethereum to fight corruption“ after reading specs of yet another country’s CBDC. I could write something about war in middle east but in the world where everyone talks about it, who would want to read even more about it in the crypto-related platform?..

So I’ll discuss the first thing that appeared in my twitter wall - Placeholder VC’s “Ethereum and Solana“ article. While in this article Ethereum and Solana are compared to iOS and Android and the whole point is quite abstract, I’ll talk about the main difference between them, not technical, but somewhat ideological.

The competition of most L1s comes down to solving blockchain trilemma. Blockchain trilemma says that there are three main characteristics of blockchains - security, scalability, and decentralisation. All modern blockchain systems can only have two of them, and we need to solve all three to make web3 happen.

As decentralisation is quite abstract metric, I’d change it here to Security (how much does it cost to hack the network and to recover from hacks) - Scalability - Users’ power (how many things in the network depend on ordinary users)

It’s worth noting that by power I don’t mean harmful actions of any specific person, but collective network management - in other words, how many things user community can control and change themselves if needed?

Different views on this factor, in fact, lead us to different scaling methods:

Ethereum

We can shortly define Ethereum’s scaling strategy as trying to squeeze out as much TPS as possible from Ethereum, while keeping node requirements at the level of home PCs and microcomputers not exceeding price of 100-200$ + consumer-grade SSDs.

By philosophy of Ethereum community, a real decentralised system must be possible to run by everyone, and only with this approach people can make worldwide computer compete with existing web2 world. It’s obvious that this approach imposes many difficulties to scalability that the community has been solving for a long time. In fact, all development in the Ethereum since its launch comes down to making the system more scalable while not increasing node requirements.
We can’t say that Ethereum community is done and they probably won’t be done for years, but right now they’re quite close to significant changes. Specifically, upcoming EIP-4844 update will increase bandwith in tens of times for rollups that already handle 5x TPS of Ethereum L1. This is the first significant step in solving this hard task of Ethereum philosophy.

Solana

Solana philosophy, in turn, says that technology is developing, and we should use it to the fullest. Solana node requirements are quite close to the power limit of modern server computers and the whole system is designed in the way that unnecessary load is stripped off. Needless to say that it’s impossible to run a node at home or on the average hardware, only the most powerful servers in large datacenters can handle the load.
Solana community believes that it’s completely fine if nodes are mostly run by projects on top of Solana, RPC providers etc, because they are also somewhat run by the community. In this view Ethereum vs Solana philosophy is quite close to 2017-era Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash philosophy.

This similarity is even reflected in the areas of development. It’s hard to say that now Bitcoin is developed at all, but in this 2017-era Bitcoin community was thinking how to scale the network keeping node requirements around microcomputer level (SegWit, Lightning, etc.), while Bitcoin Cash community was (and is) thinking how to use modern tech possibilities as efficient as possible (Xthinner, UTXO Fastsync, etc).

In case of Ethereum and Solana, Ethereum community is mostly working on ZK cryptography in rollups and Ethereum L1 itself, distributed provable storage via Danksharding - in short, technologies that help with scaling while keeping hardware requirements same. Solana community, in turn, mostly works on optimising its protocol. For example, Jump Crypto team develops Firedancer node client which is written entirely in C with Assembly and uses various memory and cryptography hacks for maximal client optimisation. It will allow protocol to work faster on modern professional-grade tech.

I consider it as the main difference between Ethereum and Solana.

A year or two ago it would be fair to simplify Ethereum vs Solana tech to decentralised vs centralised. However, if we look at the current state objectively, neither projects have single point of failure or controlled by anyone. Yes, it’s definitely simpler to control Solana than Ethereum, Solana is way more dependent on current state of tech and less “apocalypse-resistant“ than Ethereum, former also has some controversial design decisions in order to implement its view e.g leader mechanism, but I would say that now Ethereum vs Solana philosophy is something more complex than decentralised vs centralised, people vs companies, proletariat vs bourgeois (sic!), etc etc.
This leads to the fact that we can’t objectively say which approach is better. It depends on your opinion and life views, what you consider as web3 more.

What about me?

My views are closer to Ethereum philosophy. I very appreciate possibility of participating in the worldwide network even if you’re not running a commercial project or can’t afford renting a powerful server on your own. I also believe that trying to solve the main Ethereum challenge can lead to many scientific discoveries even outside the crypto space. I’m eager to help with difficulties that Ethereum community meets on its way, although I can’t say that I’m doing anything significant right now. :-)

The future will probably show who’s right. While we wait for the future, I’d like to hear your opinion about it. Mirror does not have comments, so you can comment in the posts with my article pinned.

Thanks for reading.