Frictionless Capital Co-Founder: From an Engineering Perspective, Why I Still Believe in Solana?
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Frictionless Capital Co-Founder: From an Engineering Perspective, Why I Still Believe in Solana?
Blockchains with high throughput like Solana already have the capability to support 100MB/s, which is 100 times that of Ethereum.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Logan | X
Compiled by: TechFlow
This is one of the worst takes I've seen on Twitter in a long time, fundamentally highlighting the lack of understanding between traders and engineers in this space. Let's break it down:
Fees on blockchains are driven by two factors — block space and state contention:
Block Space:
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Currently, Ethereum blocks are 0.08 MB, with 4844 adding only 0.375MB per block. In Ethereum's intended final state via danksharding, the target throughput is 1.3MB/s.
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In contrast, high-throughput blockchains like Solana already support up to 100MB/s — 100x that of Ethereum.
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I must emphasize how massive this difference is for engineers and the applications they can build. Order books are just the tip of the iceberg.
State Contention:
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State contention occurs when two or more participants attempt to access the same state simultaneously. Only one can capture that MEV opportunity.
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The single-threaded EVM cannot solve this because it lacks the ability to separate fees by state.
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Instead, the single-threaded EVM has a global fee market, forcing all applications on the network to raise fees because one application consumes more resources than others. This design decision is clearly inferior in both performance and cost efficiency.
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Next-generation blockchains like Solana have addressed this by establishing local fee markets. This is effectively equivalent to deploying multiple L2 instances while maintaining unified liquidity and applications, rather than fragmenting as the Ethereum ecosystem has chosen.
Front-running:
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Regarding front-running, Solana was designed from the ground up to provide equal and fair access for everyone.
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In my recent podcast with Toly, we discussed in detail Solana’s all-to-all gossip consensus design, which allows information to be disseminated as quickly as possible to all participants across the network.
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All-to-all consensus is expensive in terms of message overhead, with complexity at N^2. Yet Solana chose this design because they want any trader to be able to plug into a node and receive the same, equitable information as every other participant on the network.
Decentralization:
There are two metrics for measuring decentralization: number of full nodes and the Nakamoto coefficient.
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Ethereum has approximately 3,700 full nodes, with 922 currently syncing to the network.
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Full nodes matter because if a third world war unfortunately happens, you need copies of the ledger to recover and restart the network.
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Solana has about 2,118 full nodes and 843 RPC nodes. Both types can restore the ledger state. This represents roughly ~80% of Ethereum’s network coverage.
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The Nakamoto coefficient, representing real-time censorship resistance, is ~25 on Ethereum and ~31 on Solana.
Building on Solana:
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Builders on Solana and other high-throughput chains choose these ecosystems because they unlock new primitives that are strictly impossible within the Ethereum world.
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400ms block times and low latency.
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Fees ranging between $0.0001 and $0.0003.
Integrated High-Throughput Tech Stack:
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When diving deeper into the modular vs. integrated debate, what scales becomes clear. Both designs require some form of parallel processing and high throughput.
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The only debate is where these things should happen. Should you parallelize through multiple L2s, or integrate them into a single unified liquidity and application layer like Solana?
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You can move parallelization and throughput to different parts of the tech stack, but the work still needs to be done. The right design choice is building on an integrated chain rather than a modular one.
User Demand and JUMP:
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Calculate the throughput and compute requirements needed for scaled applications.
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Jump is helping Solana onboard another client, but they’re not the only team building other clients on Solana.
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Solana has experienced many ups and downs, sometimes due to its own downtime bugs, sometimes related to third-party integrations, but one thing is certain — the Solana community has persisted throughout.
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Solana will continue to exist and perform exceptionally well in the next cycle.
Underestimating engineers is at your own peril. We need to be more grounded in reality.
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@LoganJastremski
