English Title Ethereum Community Member Asserts the Resurgence of Blockchain
Ryan Berckmans, a member of the Ethereum community, has expressed his belief that Solana cannot function as the foundation of the “new” global financial system. Despite Solana’s shift towards acknowledging the importance of Layer 2 solutions, Berckmans highlights that the platform initially marketed itself as capable of handling global transactions on a single chain before rebranding its L2 solutions as “Network Extensions.” Solana’s recognition of Ethereum’s L2 backbone strategy became more apparent when a prominent Solana development team started building an SVM L2 on Ethereum.
Berckmans, who previously worked as a senior engineer on the Augur Project, identifies several barriers preventing Solana from becoming a global backbone. Firstly, Solana operates with only one production client, Agave Rust, but a global backbone requires at least three independent chain clients with a balanced stake distribution. The development of Solana’s second client, Firedancer, is facing significant delays due to the absence of a proper protocol specification and research community. Additionally, Solana’s high bandwidth requirements, which recommend a 10Gbps upload, pose centralization risks and practical limitations that challenge the idea of a global backbone.
Solana’s history of outages and lack of protocol-level fallback capabilities also present additional risks. Unlike Ethereum, Solana lacks the ability to continue producing blocks when finalization issues occur. Furthermore, Berckmans points out concerns regarding economic centralization, as Solana’s initial coin offering resulted in approximately 98% insider allocation compared to Ethereum’s 80% public sale, raising questions about true decentralization. The emergence of zk proof aggregation for L2 settlement further complicates Solana’s position, as its focus on L1 execution scaling conflicts with the requirements for a global backbone.
Berckmans predicts that Solana’s market share will continue to decline compared to Ethereum’s combined L1 and L2 ecosystem. He cites major corporations like Coinbase, Kraken, Sony, and Visa opting for Ethereum L2 solutions as evidence of the market’s direction. In conclusion, although Solana has demonstrated strength in areas like meme coin growth and price appreciation, its inherent limitations prevent it from serving as the backbone of a global financial system.
