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Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko is not letting the Ethereum community off the hook with a direct response to the most recent X post from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. With Vitalik Buterin revealing his plans to bring back the Cypherpunk initiative on Ethereum once again, Yakovenko said his plans remain to “make solana even faster.”
Unending ETH versus SOL face-off
There has been a subtle technological competition between Ethereum and Solana with the latter now judged to be a better alternative in several aspects. The competition between both protocols has stirred rivalry between members of their respective communities, and the current statement from Yakovenko is stoking the embers of debate once again.
“A world where ethereum succeeds as a cockroach settlement layer needs a high performance execution engine that is best in class at synchronizing state at the speed of light,” he wrote on the X app about Solana.
The debate triggered by this post sparked some counter reactions with a user @llamaonthebrink asking what Yakovenko would do if a more efficient protocol with a better token emerges in the near future. In his response, the Solana founder said that the whole essence of Solana is to optimize for performance.
What would be faster about it? The whole purpose of solana is to optimize for performance, so if there is any design change to make it faster it will get adopted asap. The only difference would be the hardware
— toly 🇺🇸 (@aeyakovenko) December 29, 2023
This implies the ease with which the protocol can adopt better technology over time. While Ethereum is also on a constant upgradeability path, a more noticeable performance update has been seen in Solana over the years.
Solana outpacing Ethereum
The growing rivalry between Solana and Ethereum is also taking a new turn with the former now outpacing the latter in some important aspects, including the DEX trading volume.
Ethereum has established itself as the de facto decentralized finance (DeFi) giant with over $61.10 billion in total value locked (TVL) against Solana’s $3.968 billion. However, the tides are changing and many now believe Solana has what it takes to surpass Ethereum in the long term.
Besides the obvious data insights, other top analysts like Raoul Pal are also commenting on the Ethereum and Solana rivalry as he named the former the Android of Web3 and Solana the Apple alternative.