As the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum has long been the go-to platform for decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. But Solana, a new platform that’s been billed as faster, cheaper, and more scalable than Ethereum, is quickly gaining buzz in the crypto community.
So can Solana live up to the hype and dethrone Ethereum as the top platform for dApps and smart contracts? Let’s take a closer look.
Solana: An Overview
Solana is a permissionless, proof-of-stake blockchain that’s been designed for high scalability. The project was founded in 2017 by former Qualcomm and Cloudflare engineers, and it raised $20 million from a group of high-profile investors including Multicoin Capital, Draper Associates, and CoinBase Ventures.
Solana’s key selling points are its speed and scalability. The platform can reportedly process up to 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), which is far higher than Ethereum’s current TPS of 15.
And because Solana doesn’t use gas fees like Ethereum does, it’s much cheaper to use as well.
In terms of scalability, Solana uses a unique Proof of History consensus algorithm that allows it to process transactions without needing to wait for each block to be finalized. This means that Solana can theoretically scale infinitely–a feat that Ethereum has yet to achieve.
So far, Solana has been off to a promising start. The platform launched its mainnet in March 2020, and since then it’s been steadily adding new features and attracting new users.
In May 2020, Solana announced that it had processed more than 1 billion transactions on its network–a significant milestone for any blockchain project.
The Road Ahead for Solana
There’s no doubt that Solana has a lot of potential. But can it really dethrone Ethereum as the leading platform for dApps and smart contracts?
For now, Ethereum still has a significant lead in terms of developer adoption and ecosystem growth. It’s been around for longer than Solana, and it currently boasts more than 2 million active developers–compared to just 1,000 for Solana.
In addition, there are currently more than 10 times as many dApps built on Ethereum than there are on Solana.
That said, things could change quickly in the crypto space–and Solana does have some major advantages over Ethereum that could help it gain ground in the coming years. First and foremost is its speed and scalability; as more developers begin to realize the potential of building on a blockchain that can process transactions quickly and cheaply without running into scaling issues, they may start migrating their projects over to Solana.
In addition, because Solana is still relatively new, there’s a good chance that more innovative features and improvements will be added to the platform in the coming months and years–something that could make it even more appealing to developers.
Only time will tell whether Solana can overtake Ethereum as the top platform for dApps and smart contracts. But given its strong team of experienced developers, impressive list of backers, and promising early traction, it’s definitely one blockchain project worth keeping an eye on in the months and years ahead.