Is Solana Better Than Ethereum in 2022

The year 2021 for cryptocurrencies was one of intense fluctuations and emotions. We had leaders like Elon Musk promoting meme coins like Dogecoin. In turn, we saw a significant increase in the market as a whole and a surge in meme coins like Doge and Shiba Inu.

While the coins mentioned above got a lot of attention and coverage, Solana was comparatively quite under the radar. Most people followed the herd and got into these pyramid schemes for the thrill, while Solana’s benefits and features were ignored.

On looking at Solana’s chart, you can see that at the start of 2021, its price was an inexpensive $1.5. As of right now, it is at around $148, an astounding 100x return.

People have coined it the “Ethereum Killer” because they believe it is the best alternative to Ethereum and doesn’t have the same flaws.

Let’s take a look into the features of Solana and see if it truly has applications and if it is worthy of its comparison with Ethereum.

Proof of History

While Bitcoin uses the archaic proof of work and Ethereum is slowly moving to proof of stake, Solana, from its inception, has been using proof of stake consensus along with proof of history. Proof of history means the integration of the timestamps of transactions into the blockchain itself. Solana doesn’t rely on outside sources for time like Ethereum.

Proof of history is a Verifiable Delay Function (VDA). This simple protocol change allows validators to verify transactions swiftly. Solana is very fast and can process around 50,000 transactions per sec at an average cost of $0.00025 per transaction. This fact itself makes Solana very impressive. If you have ever tried deploying a smart contract or calling a function from some smart contract on the Ethereum mainnet, you know that gas prices have become ridiculous.

Smart Contracts

One of the reasons Ethereum is so sought out is smart contracts. Smart contracts allow to store logic and states on the blockchain and can thus act as a traditional backend. One of the reasons many other blockchains don’t get so much traction is the lack of smart contracts. Without them, developers have do not have good enough reason to switch from Ethereum.

Solana, just like Ethereum, has smart contracts. These are coded using Rust and can even be coded using Solidity. Smart contracts in Solana are read-only and stateless. It contains only program logic. The states(data) are stored on the Solana accounts themselves.

Because of this capability, developers have started building Dapps on the Solana blockchain. As of right now, there are about 400 projects on Solana.

Decentralization

This is where things get a little complicated. Solana is not as decentralized as it should be. You might have heard of the blockchain trilemma, which states that a decentralized network can only have two out of the three — . decentralization, scalability, and security.

Becoming a validator on the Solana network is really difficult. The barrier to entry is very high. According to their requirements, the estimated setup cost for a Solana validator is $5k. Then you also have the network costs. You also need to have a lot of Sol to attract stakers.

Most of the coins are also held in just a few accounts of the founders, team, and VCs. The public holds a very small percentage of coins.

Although Solana has no explicit roadmap, we can assume that this will improve as time passes and as more adoption occurs.

The Community

Solana has a great community of investors and developers. As mentioned before, there are already many projects on the network. You can buy and sell NFT’s on Solana. Many Nft projects are switching over to Solana by the day. There are games like Afflarium that give you the metaverse experience.

The founders and employees are very vocal and interact on Solana’s social pages like Reddit, discord, medium, etc. All in all, it is a very wholesome community where developers help each other out to try to build a better Web 3.0.

In Conclusion

While Solana looks very promising, it is still too early to tell if it can come out on top in the future. Ethereum has the advantage of mass adoption, and it has stood the test of time.

Also, note that Solana has had multiple network outages because of DDoS attacks. In September of 2021, the network was down for 17 hours.

For now, all we can do is wait and see how many projects are implemented using Solana and hope it can live up to its reputation as the “Ethereum Killer.”