Solana and others rise as contenders—why can't they shake Ethereum's dominance?
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Solana and others rise as contenders—why can't they shake Ethereum's dominance?
At a time when EVM dominates the landscape and layer2 has yet to explode, narratives such as MEME and DePin alone are not enough to shake ETH's market position.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Haotian
Recently, Solana has led a charge alongside other layer-1 blockchains like Avalanche and NEAR, sparking renewed talk of "killing Ethereum." Indeed, the "ETH Killer" narrative was the go-to playbook for most layer-1 chains during the last bull market.
However, in today’s landscape where EVM dominates and layer2 has yet to explode, narratives centered on MEME or DePin alone are insufficient to challenge Ethereum’s market position. This is merely a brief rally by alternative layer-1s before the Cancun upgrade. Why?
1) The long-standing “kill Ethereum” narrative embraced by competing blockchains has already been thoroughly tested—and ultimately proven “failed”—over one full market cycle. On the surface, this stems from Ethereum's strong market consensus, vibrant developer innovation, and the magical composability of DeFi and NFT financial applications.
In reality, it's because the crypto market remains constrained by technical, market, and regulatory factors, preventing true mass adoption. The so-called technological “leaps” offered by these new blockchains haven’t sparked new narratives or expanded market size—they’re still feeding off Ethereum’s spillover benefits.
Solana, Avalanche, Aptos, and others aim to fundamentally improve performance through innovations in programming languages, code complexity, and execution mechanisms, offering better infrastructure for applications. For example, Solana’s high throughput and superior user experience (UX) technically make it more suitable for future growth in the crypto market.
Yet, the current market logic hasn’t truly evolved.
Risk-seeking capital, market participants chasing wealth shortcuts, constantly evolving game mechanics, persistent information asymmetry, and occasional breakout rags-to-riches stories—these elements together form the core ingredients of cyclical bull markets.
This allows Ethereum—with its “inherently limited” technology—to thrive anyway, patched together through various EIPs and ERC standards, spawning a massive application ecosystem while enabling competing chains to intermittently rise via spillover effects.
But everyone is still feeding off Ethereum’s DeFi market gains. It’s not yet time for alt-layer1s to easily replace or surpass Ethereum.
2) Ethereum’s “inherent flaws” have already inspired a mature set of solutions. For instance: scalability challenges have given rise to Rollup, Plasma, Validium, and other approaches; limitations of EOA addresses have been addressed via ERC-4337 Account Abstraction, which even spawned an entire account abstraction sector;
Moreover, layer2 itself has become a major narrative, with OP-Rollups and ZK-Rollups locked in an ongoing battle; further upgrades like post-Cancun blob space, and longer-term developments such as sharding and base-layer SNARKification, offer continued support;
Even potential data availability (DA) bottlenecks due to block size limits have led to innovative fixes—EigenLayer’s restaking-based DA optimization, modular integration with third-party DA layers like Celestia, and alternative VM execution options.
Ethereum’s overall development, scaling, and ecosystem expansion environment is now sufficiently mature and thriving. The real foundation of Ethereum’s dominance lies in its powerful developer community.
Although Ethereum’s past few years of Lego-style ecosystem building have fallen short of expectations, successfully transitioning from PoW to PoS amid frequent hacker attacks, retaining developer focus around the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and evolving a grand layer2 narrative demonstrate that Ethereum’s future potential should not be underestimated.
Believing in Ethereum means respecting its years of solidified consensus and honoring the vast community of builders behind it.
I still recall how, at the end of 2018, EOS claimed to introduce a revolutionary blockchain paradigm and triggered a wave of gambling dApps—but we all saw how quickly that faded. In the end, it was slow but steady Ethereum that endured.
Real value discovery takes time—it must be slowly captured.
3) Layer2 development did indeed slow down during the bear market, especially without a “layer2 summer” to reward those building in the ecosystem—leaving many contributors feeling frustrated.
Still, the sluggish pace of layer2 development mirrors how Ethereum’s DeFi spillovers enabled new chains to establish independent ecosystems. The second phase of Ethereum’s layer2 evolution will require high-frequency transactions and application-driven use cases. Relying solely on spillover effects and path dependency from Ethereum’s financial models offers no competitive edge against alt-layer1s.
On one hand, Arbitrum and Optimism (OP-Rollups) enjoy early-mover advantages and have expanded their reach under the “Superchain” strategy. But these expansions remain largely B2B plays. OP-Rollups must overcome criticism around centralization and drive real C2C user growth.
On the other hand, zkSync and Starknet (ZK-Rollups) possess more advanced technical capabilities. However, ZK technology is inherently future-oriented—the existing user base is too small to fully showcase ZK’s strengths. Only when user numbers grow significantly will gas costs become negligible and UX truly seamless—this is the ultimate vision for ZK-based layer2s.
Beyond the leaders, mid-tier and emerging layer2 projects are also rising. For example, Metis is experimenting with Hyper (OP+ZK) Rollup tech, decentralized sequencers via POS, and transforming token incentives from governance to utility. Meanwhile, Espresso, Astria, and others are advancing shared sequencer solutions, extending layer2 potential through Rollup-as-a-Service models.
Don’t assume OP+ZK tells the whole layer2 story. In my view, the layer2 war has only just begun—the real competition may only heat up after the Cancun upgrade. Wasn’t the recent counter-trend rally among layer2 tokens precisely a release of pent-up frustration?
When application-specific chain narratives expand and mass adoption finally arrives, the capital, users, and dApps accumulated within the layer2 ecosystem will be far more durable than those on any alt-layer1.
4) Of course, advocating for Ethereum’s ecosystem doesn’t mean dismissing Solana’s market potential. Undeniably, Solana starts from a higher technological baseline than previous blockchain architectures. Its separation of storage and computation, along with high-concurrency transaction processing, makes it highly user-friendly and easier to bootstrap an ecosystem.
Take DePin as an example—a narrative that has repeatedly failed in the past with projects like Filecoin and Arweave. Whether DePin can truly succeed on Solana remains uncertain, but I’d say my confidence in DePin increases if it unfolds there. After all, Solana’s high-throughput architecture integrates naturally with web2, unlike ecosystems cobbled together through modular components.
Solana’s current rise is partly due to a temporary lull in Ethereum’s layer2 activity, and partly due to its own active developer community. But let’s clarify: Solana isn’t aiming to kill Ethereum. Instead, it’s targeting Ethereum’s blind spots for strategic breakthroughs. If successful and able to match Ethereum’s ecosystem scale, it might achieve parity—but replacement? That’s a stretch.
Ethereum will inevitably face pressure from new chains built on cutting-edge foundations. But they aren’t “killers.” I prefer to call them web3 innovators breaking new ground.
Ethereum has already succeeded in DeFi and built a vast, composable ecosystem. Its next frontiers—layer2 and layer3—are still unfolding.
If Ethereum—with its openness, inclusivity, trustlessness, and composability—ultimately fails to realize blockchain’s value proposition, I find it hard to believe any new chain would succeed.
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Haotian | CryptoInsight
