In brief, According to Ryan Berckmans, an engineer and member of the Ethereum community, Solana does not have the infrastructure necessary to function as the cornerstone of an international financial system. Solana’s lack of decentralization, high bandwidth requirements, and technical limitations, he says, provide a more sustainable model than Ethereum’s Layer 1 and Layer 2 environment.
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Solana’s Shift from “Monolithic” to Layered Solutions
Solana initially promoted itself as a high-throughput, single-chain platform capable of handling global transactions. Since then, though, it has begun implementing Layer 2 (L2) solutions, renaming them “Network Extensions.” This change is more in line with Ethereum’s proven L2 approach, which has allowed a number of applications to create unique L2 appchains on the platform.
Technical Difficulties Preventing Solana from Developing a Global Backbone
Berckmans claims that there is an issue with Solana’s single-client strategy, which just uses the agave rust client. At least three independent customers with a balanced stake distribution are necessary for a robust global backbone. Firedancer, Solana’s second client, has had delays that have been made worse by a lack of research resources and protocol specification. Furthermore, the platform’s reach in areas with lower network capacity is restricted by Solana’s 10Gbps upload suggestion, which raises centralization issues. The outage history of Solana was also brought to light by Berckmans, who pointed out that the protocol-level fallback mechanisms required for continuing block production during finalization issues are absent from the system.
Decentralization and Market Share Concerns
Berckmans raised concerns about Solana’s decentralization, citing that around 98% of Solana’s initial token allocation went to insiders, in contrast to Ethereum’s 80% public sale. He also points to the emergence of zero-knowledge (zk) proof aggregation, which enhances L2 settlement capabilities, as a challenge to Solana’s reliance on Layer 1 execution scaling.
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The Benefits of Ethereum for Corporate Adoption
Solana’s market share will probably decrease if big companies like Coinbase, Sony, and Visa choose Ethereum L2 solutions, according to Berckmans. He claims that although Solana has performed exceptionally well in several domains, its structural flaws prohibit it from acting as the foundation of an international financial system.
