This year. Solana plans to roll out a major update that will increase its transaction processing power and coincide with the release of a possible “breakthrough” consumer app. Solana’s proponents believe that these advancements will strengthen its position as the “Ethereum killer” and allow it to surpass Ethereum in the near future. Memecoin’s resurrection has contributed to the network’s recent rise in on-chain activity, developer involvement, and user growth. The flexibility to code in different languages, including Rust, C, Python, and eventually Move. As well as lower prices have drawn engineers from Ethereum to Solana, as Austin Federa of the Foundation pointed out. This broad programming capability creates a lot of opportunities for consumer-facing Solana applications, which could lead to a change in the market.
“This isn’t to say Ethereum won’t figure it out eventually, but today, we’re seeing a huge number of projects on Ethereum that want to move over to Solana. That’s not something we were seeing a year and a half ago.”
Federa is confident that Solana will host most new consumer apps in the future, potentially becoming the most used, if not the most beneficial. Similarly, Henrik Andersson of Apollo Crypto sees the potential for Solana to have a “ChatGPT moment,” with a hit app driving significant funding and user growth.
“If Solana were to have a breakthrough app in SocialFi, DePIN or the gaming space, Solana could gain enough traction from that app alone to rival Ethereum.”
Firedancer’s Impact on Solana’s Weaknesses
Nevertheless, Solana has not been able to completely eradicate one issue since its launch in March 2020.
The Solana network experienced yet another extended failure on February 9 that left it completely unusable for almost five hours.
Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradatation, block progression is currently halted, core engineers & validators are actively investigating.
— Laine ❤️ stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) February 6, 2024
Solana’s recent outage, attributed to its limited client diversity, highlights a major vulnerability. Pranav Kanade of VanEck sees this as a key challenge in competing with Ethereum. While Solana acknowledges the importance of reliability. The upcoming Firedancer upgrade offers hope for strengthening the network’s resilience, according to both Kanade and Federa.
“I believe Firedancer to be a major impetus. It would be a major event for the network if it ships, and I would anticipate that SOL will eventually overtake ETH in terms of worth. I would anticipate that Ethereum’s modular roadmap would catch up if it doesn’t ship.
Flippening” may not be as unlikely
Despite Solana’s SOL surge to $133, Ethereum’s ETH remains higher at $3,697. With a market cap of $404 billion compared to Solana’s $60 billion. Solana’s recent outage underlines its vulnerabilities. Mark Smargon views Ethereum’s foundational status as unlikely to be surpassed by Solana,. Highlighting their different focuses and potential for collaboration.
The philosophies and ethos of Solana and Ethereum are dissimilar. The primary objective of one is to be the quickest, whereas Ethereum is creating a network that is impervious to censorship. Both of them are capable of winning.
