With its unique technical advantages and vibrant community, Solana has undeniably become a "star" performer in the public blockchain arena. This article analyzes why Solana has emerged as a superstar in Web3 from both a technical and data-driven perspective.
Following the completion of the Dencun upgrade, aside from a significant reduction in Layer 2 gas fees, the Ethereum ecosystem hasn't garnered much attention. Instead, Solana once again took center stage during the recent meme coin frenzy. Although the hype around memes on Solana has cooled this week, its distinct technical strengths and active community have solidified its position as a standout in today's blockchain landscape.
Why Solana Stands Out
Unlike many other Layer 1 blockchains, Solana's goal isn't necessarily to surpass Ethereum. The original vision of Solana's founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, was to create a "Nasdaq for the blockchain industry"—achieving transaction scales and response speeds comparable to Nasdaq on a blockchain, thereby providing fast, inclusive on-chain financial services for a broader user base. Consequently, Solana has always emphasized transaction speed and performance, which remain among its most notable features today.
Solana's whitepaper claims a theoretical throughput of 710,000 transactions per second. However, at the time of writing, Solana's TPS has remained relatively stable at around 2,000–3,000 over the past six hours, nearly 300 times lower than the theoretical figure. If we consider that Solana's TPS calculation includes "vote transactions" for consensus messages (which currently account for about two-thirds of Solana's TPS and are typically not counted in TPS on other blockchains), the actual TPS for "non-vote transactions" involving dApp smart contract interactions might only be around 600–900. This is a significant gap from expectations, but compared to Ethereum and its L2s, Solana still holds a clear advantage, especially in handling parallel transactions.
Of course, TPS alone isn't a perfect metric. High TPS can be "artificially inflated": imagine a blockchain that produces one block per hour but each block contains a billion transactions—theoretically, it would have a TPS of 277,000. While such a TPS might seem impressive, who would tolerate waiting 30–60 minutes for a transaction to confirm? TPS is important, but it often overlooks the impact of block time on user experience. For users, the difference between 0.4 seconds (Solana's average block time) and 12 seconds (Ethereum's average block time) is substantial. Any delay exceeding one second in user experience can be perceived as intolerable, especially in today's transaction-oriented crypto world where every millisecond counts. Thus, Solana not only offers robust transaction capacity but also delivers an efficient trading experience that meets user demands.
Beyond speed, low cost is equally crucial. Compared to Ethereum's high fees, Solana's fees are incredibly cheap, typically costing just 0.000005 SOL per transfer (a fixed value, approximately $0.001 at current prices). This fee is an order of magnitude lower than what Ethereum Layer 2s charge post-Dencun upgrade. This difference might not be noticeable in low-frequency, high-value transaction scenarios, but when high-frequency trading is involved, the cost disparity between $0.001 and $0.01 becomes significant.
Moreover, widespread adoption of technology only accelerates when the cost of interaction between users and products drops substantially. History has repeatedly demonstrated this "rule": in the early 2000s, inexpensive Nokia phones replaced landline connections; later, even cheaper smartphones replaced Nokia phones, rapidly ushering humanity into the mobile digital age. The prerequisite for such rapid technological penetration is that these technologies become efficient and affordable enough during their development. Solana's aforementioned advantages have already shown great potential across various domains. Whether it's the rapid growth of DeFi, memes, NFTs, GameFi, or the real-world integration of blockchain technology through DePIN projects, economic and social activities on Solana are becoming increasingly diverse.
In the long run, due to its "unconventional" technical route and architecture, Solana may also establish irreplaceable advantages.
First, Solana heavily relies on hardware to address challenges arising from advancements in software-layer protocols, ensuring that its speed and scale improve alongside hardware progress. In the current landscape where Moore's Law is gradually fading and AI technology is driving breakthroughs in GPU/parallel processing capabilities, the computer hardware industry is surpassing software protocols as a new hotspot. Solana is poised to ride this wave of hardware development, further widening the performance gap with other Layer 1 blockchains that depend on software protocol advancements.
Additionally, Solana's commitment to a monolithic architecture might deliver a different experience. This choice is undoubtedly a contrarian bet compared to the mainstream development approach of most public blockchains. Including Ethereum, many blockchains view monolithic architecture as a long-term scalability hindrance and attempt to address it through modular scaling, Layer 2 expansion, and various forms of sharding. However, as blockchain applications become increasingly complex and intertwined, the development complexity of building on modular/layered/sharded systems may grow exponentially, and the difficulty for users to interact across different systems will also rise rapidly. In contrast, monolithic architecture offers lower coordination complexity, reduced aggregation latency, and a relatively smaller attack surface. Solana could deliver a more极致 user experience with its holistic architecture.
Of course, none of this is certain. The only certainty is that Solana is rapidly rising as the current "traffic carrier" of the Web3 world.
Solana: The Current Superstar of Web3
In terms of trading volume, Solana has maintained strong momentum over the past month. Unlike the volatile fluctuations in ETH trading volume, driven by the meme frenzy, Solana's token trading volume surged over 775.91% month-over-month, surpassing the $10 billion mark on weekends. Although there's still a gap between ETH and SOL in terms of token trading volume, the distance between them is narrowing noticeably.
Compared to trading volume, token turnover rate (referring to the frequency of token buying and selling over a certain period) better reflects changes in market liquidity. Over the past year, SOL's token turnover rate has consistently been higher than ETH's, with a recent trend of further widening the gap. A high turnover rate doesn't necessarily indicate high token value (it only proves trading value), but a low turnover rate certainly suggests insufficient liquidity.
From the perspective of active users, the number of daily active users on the Solana network has continued to grow rapidly since March, breaking the milestones of 1 million and 2 million on March 16th and 17th respectively, setting new records for the highest number of daily active users in the history of the cryptocurrency world. This data might overstate the actual number of users since many individuals control multiple addresses, making it difficult to distinguish. However, with a monthly growth rate of 379.8% and an annual growth rate of 1816.6%, the growth momentum of Solana's active user base remains impressive.
More importantly, whether in Web2 or Web3, the number of developers is one of the most valuable metrics. As Steve Ballmer once famously said, ".net's key to success is developers, developers, developers." In 2023, approximately 2,000 developers (including full-time and part-time) participated in building the Solana ecosystem, ranking about 7th among all crypto ecosystems. This ranking was higher before 2023, but many developers left due to the FTX event and SOL's underperformance. However, considering the recent recovery of the Solana ecosystem, more developers might reconsider and enter this space.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What makes Solana's transaction speed so fast?
Solana achieves high throughput through its unique Proof of History (PoH) consensus combined with Proof of Stake (PoS). This allows the network to process transactions in parallel and order them efficiently, significantly reducing block times and increasing overall capacity.
Is Solana more decentralized than Ethereum?
Decentralization is multifaceted. While Ethereum has a larger number of nodes, Solana's architecture prioritizes speed and scalability. Both networks have different trade-offs, and the level of decentralization can be measured in various ways, including node distribution and client diversity.
What are the main risks associated with the Solana network?
Like any blockchain, Solana faces risks such as potential security vulnerabilities, network congestion (as seen in past outages), and reliance on continued hardware advancement for scaling. Its relatively younger ecosystem also means less battle-testing compared to Ethereum.
How does Solana's fee structure work?
Solana transaction fees are minimal and fixed, typically costing a fraction of a cent. This is because fees are not used to prioritize transactions in the same way as Ethereum; instead, they primarily serve as anti-spam measures and are burned to reduce inflation.
Can Solana and Ethereum coexist?
Absolutely. The blockchain space is increasingly moving towards a multi-chain future. Solana and Ethereum cater to different needs—high-speed, low-cost transactions vs. a highly secure, decentralized settlement layer. They can interoperate and complement each other.
What are some popular use cases on Solana today?
Solana has seen significant growth in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), gaming (GameFi), and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). Its low costs make it ideal for microtransactions and high-frequency interactions.
Concluding Thoughts
Although Solana's current performance is impressive and it even shows trends of surpassing Ethereum in certain metrics, as mentioned at the beginning, Solana's goal was never to defeat Ethereum. Perhaps helping Web3 technology penetrate traditional Web2 markets with high throughput, low latency, and low-cost transaction performance aligns better with Solana's original vision.
Furthermore, even with fierce competition from newcomers, the fundamental landscape of Ethereum's lead hasn't changed. Over past rounds of competition, public chain ecosystems have shifted from exclusive competition to cooperation as the main theme. Looking at the current public chain landscape, besides Ethereum, other chains either absorb application value overflow from Ethereum based on their vertical ecosystems to attract mainstream participants, or attract Ethereum users and traffic转移 with innovative technical advantages.
Whichever path is chosen, immense development opportunities exist. Because in the future, we might enter a highly cross-chain integrated Web3 world where value barriers between blockchains gradually disappear. Even Solana and Ethereum could achieve completely free flow of value in certain scenarios, benefiting both blockchains.