Frictionless Co-founder: Why Are We Optimistic About Solana?

Original author: @LoganJastremski

Original compilation: Kaori, BlockBeats

The fees on the blockchain are driven by two factors—block space and state contention:

Block Space

Currently, the Ethereum block space is 0.08 MB, with EIP-4844 adding 0.375 MB per block, while the target throughput under Ethereum's assumed danksharding end state is 1.3MB/s.

In contrast, high-throughput blockchains like Solana are already capable of supporting speeds of 100MB per second. I cannot underestimate the significant difference this makes for engineers and the applications they can build. Order books are just the tip of the iceberg.

State Contention

State contention arises when two or more parties attempt to access the same state fragment simultaneously, with only one person able to access that MEV transaction. A single-threaded EVM cannot solve this problem because it lacks the ability to isolate fees for each state.

Instead, the single-threaded EVM has a global fee market, which forces all applications on the network to raise fees because a single application consumes more resources than others. This design decision is severely lacking in both performance and cost.

Chains like Solana have addressed this issue by building a native fee market, maintaining liquidity and application unity while deploying multiple L2 use cases, rather than fragmenting as the Ethereum ecosystem has chosen to do, which is very practical.

Front-running

On the topic of front-running, Solana indeed aims to provide fair and equal access for everyone.

In a recent podcast with Toly, we delved into the all-to-all propagation in Solana's consensus design, which allows information to be sent to all participants in the group at the fastest speed physically allowed.

All-to-all consensus has significant messaging overhead, with a complexity of N^2; however, Solana chose this design because they want any trader to connect to a node and receive the same and equal information as everyone else in the network.

Decentralization

There are two aspects to measuring decentralization: the number of full nodes and the Nakamoto coefficient. Full nodes are important because if a third world war were to occur, you would need a copy of the ledger to recover and restart the network.

Ethereum has about 3,700 full nodes, with 922 nodes currently syncing with the network. Solana has about 2,118 full nodes and 843 RPC nodes. Both can recover the ledger state. This is about 80% of Ethereum's network coverage.

The Nakamoto coefficient, as a proxy for real-time censorship resistance, is 25 for Ethereum and 31 for Solana.

Building on Solana

Solana and other high-throughput builders choose to build in these ecosystems because they fundamentally unlock new primitives that are simply not possible in the Ethereum world.

Solana has a block generation time of 400ms, low latency, and fees ranging from $0.0001 to $0.0003.

Integrating High Throughput Tech Stack

In the deep dive into the debate between modularity and integration, the need for scaling becomes apparent. Both designs require some form of parallel processing and high throughput. The only debate is where these things should happen.

Should you parallelize through multiple L2s, or should you integrate them into a unified liquidity and application like Solana?

Should you achieve high throughput through Eigen DA or a Data Availability Committee, or unify them into a high-throughput ecosystem?

Jonah, like many others in the industry, needs to understand the core engineering at hand; parallel processing and high throughput are necessary conditions for industry scaling.

You can move parallelization and throughput to different parts of the tech stack, but that work is still required. The right design choice is to build on integrated chains rather than modular chains.

User Demand and Leap

You would be surprised by the throughput and computing power required for scalable applications. Jump is helping Solana work with another client, but this is by no means the only team building additional clients on Solana.

Solana has experienced many ups and downs, sometimes due to its own outages and sometimes due to third-party collaborations, but one thing is certain: the Solana community has always persevered throughout the process. Solana will endure and shine brightly in the upcoming cycles.

Questioning the capabilities of engineers will backfire; now is the time to demonstrate a cold, pragmatic spirit.