Ryan Berckmans, a member of the Ethereum community, asserts that Solana is unlikely to serve as the backbone of a “new” global financial system. He highlights the platform’s evolution from a “monolithic” approach to recognizing the value of Layer 2 (L2) solutions, yet critiques its initial claims of being capable of managing global transactions on a single chain.
Berckmans notes that Solana has rebranded its L2 offerings as “Network Extensions” rather than openly acknowledging them as L2 solutions. This shift in strategy followed the observation that key applications were building custom L2 appchains on Solana’s network. Notably, a significant development team within Solana has even pivoted to creating an SVM L2 on Ethereum.
Key Barriers for Solana
Berckmans identifies several critical barriers that hinder Solana’s potential as a global backbone:
Limited Production Clients: Solana currently operates with only one production client, Agave Rust. Berckmans argues that a robust global backbone requires at least three independent chain clients with balanced stake distribution.
Delayed Development: The creation of a second client, Firedancer, is facing significant delays due to the absence of a proper protocol specification and a supporting research community.
Centralization Risks: Solana’s high bandwidth requirements—recommending 10Gbps upload speeds—pose risks of centralization and practical limitations, undermining the idea of a universally operable global backbone.
Outage History: Solana has experienced outages and lacks protocol-level fallback capabilities, which contrasts with Ethereum’s ability to continue producing blocks during finalization issues.
Economic Centralization: With approximately 98% of tokens allocated to insiders during its initial coin offering, compared to Ethereum’s 80% public sale, questions arise regarding Solana’s true decentralization.
Competition from zk Proofs: The rise of zero-knowledge (zk) proof aggregation for L2 settlements further complicates Solana’s standing, as its focus remains on Layer 1 execution scaling, which conflicts with the needs of a global backbone.
Berckmans predicts a continuing decline in Solana’s market share relative to Ethereum’s combined L1 and L2 ecosystem, citing major corporations such as Coinbase, Kraken, Sony, and Visa favoring Ethereum L2 solutions.
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