Earlier, I had a discussion about blockchain. Many people say Ethereum is slow and expensive, while Solana is fast and cheap. Does that mean Ethereum is far behind? To defend my viewpoint, I need to write a post.
1. Ethereum is slow and expensive
Ethereum is the first blockchain to support smart contracts. Even though it switched to PoS in 2022, the mainnet still only handles around 30-100 transactions per second to ensure security and decentralization, avoiding situations where some nodes become too powerful and congest the network. When the network is busy, fees increase.
2. Ethereum's solution is Layer 2:
Instead of increasing block size or reducing block time, Ethereum chooses to expand through Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism… to reduce fees and increase speed, while Layer 1 still plays the main role and remains safe.
3. Solana is fast
Solana uses the PoH consensus mechanism, enabling extremely fast transaction ordering, achieving up to 65,000 TPS. Low fees, fast speed.
4. So what about Solana's current issues?
Solana requires validators to use extremely powerful hardware such as multi-core CPUs, large RAM, and high SSDs, comparable to supercomputers, meaning that not everyone can run a node. This makes Solana less decentralized than Ethereum, with validators concentrated in a few large organizations. Furthermore, Solana has experienced network outages more than 10 times from 2021 to 2024 due to synchronization errors, transaction spam, or bugs. The faster the blockchain, the more blocks are generated, leading to an ever-expanding ledger.
In summary:
Ethereum is not slow because it is weak, but because it prioritizes security and decentralization. Solana is fast, but sacrifices some stability and decentralization.
So which one do you choose: Maximum speed or Absolute safety?
