Ethereum OG: Five reasons why Solana cannot become the backbone of memory blockchain

Author: Ethereum OG Ryan Berckmans Original article: "There'll be one global backbone - Ethereum" Compiled by Zombiet

Ethereum is the backbone of the new global financial system, carrying L2 and L1 applications. No other memory blockchain can match this position. Some people suggest that Solana can become a backbone, but Solana can never become the infrastructure of the global financial system. This article will explain five reasons.

Four years ago, Ethereum began to focus on becoming the backbone of the new global financial system, with a focus on supporting the needs of L2 and L1 applications. This strategy is gradually being recognized as the top L1 strategy, although it is still in its early stages, it can be seen that the strong stool of L2 is the most direct proof.

Although Solana has performed well in terms of meme and SOL prices recently, with the increasing trend of L2 eating up the market share of new public chains, Solana's leadership seems to be aware of this reality and proposes that Solana can transform into a "backbone" like Ethereum.

However, Solana is not inherently suitable as a backbone for L2 or global level L1 activities. I will explain in detail the reasons behind it.

Firstly, let's review the process of Solana's leadership gradually accepting the Ethereum L2 backbone strategy. Initially, Solana created a fast and low-cost 'single chain', which was in the era of 'monolithic' and confidently promoted this concept. But over time, they transformed this term into 'integrated'. In the middle of this year, Solana acknowledged that L2 is the right path, as their flagship app gradually begins building customized L2 application chains on Sol. In addition, an important member of the Solana community once published a radical post about Solana having to adopt L2, which sparked intense controversy in the community because the Solana leadership at the time had not yet publicly acknowledged the inevitability of L2.

Although the Solana leadership expressed their intention to support L2, they claimed that Solana's L2 is not L2, but rather a 'network extension'. This is a significant marketing shift, similar to Solana's recent launch of 'Real TPS', aimed at correcting the previous practice of including 80% of consensus burden in TPS data when reporting TPS. Solana's long-term reported TPS is 3000, but in reality it is around 750 TPS.

Why does Solana now support Ethereum's backbone strategy?

The reason is that the world is about to need thousands or even tens of thousands of new chains, and L2 has more advantages than Alt L1 (such as Coinbase, Kraken, Sony, EVE Online, etc. have all chosen L2), so becoming the backbone of L2 is undoubtedly the best strategy.

Can Solana become a backbone chain? The answer is negative, Solana does not meet this condition for the following reasons.

Five reasons why Solana cannot become a global backbone chain

1. Lack of true client diversity

Client diversity means that the memory blockchain is run in parallel by multiple independent programs, which helps prevent attacks and accidents. To become a global backbone chain, client diversity is crucial. Today, Solana has only one production client (agave rust), and the development of the second client (fireworks) is progressing slowly and has not yet reached the standard of being able to support 50% of the output share.

2. High bandwidth demand leads to centralization risk

Solana requires 10Gbps upload bandwidth, which in reality leads to centralization and increased risk. The purpose of global backbone is to minimize risks, and high bandwidth requirements severely limit its deployment flexibility.

3. Facing the risk of future interruptions

Solana has experienced multiple shutdowns in the past and lacks Ethereum's protocol level backup. For global backbones with trust assets exceeding $100 trillion, stability is crucial, and a shutdown would greatly weaken their applicability.

4. Economic centralization

About 98% of the initial supply of SOL is held internally, with only about 2% publicly sold. In contrast, Ethereum publicly sold 80% of its supply, and the PoW high inflation model widely dispersed ETH holdings over the course of seven years. This economic centralization makes it difficult for Solana to become a global backbone chain.

5. zk proof aggregation is applicable to L2 settlement

Zk proves that aggregation enables L1 backbone chains to support extremely high scalability without sacrificing decentralization. Solana focuses on expanding the L1 execution layer, but this contradicts the need for global backbone chains to maximize decentralization and trust neutrality.

For these reasons, Solana will never be able to become the backbone of the new global financial system.

In short, Ethereum's backbone strategy is the best L1 strategy, and Solana may attempt to transition towards this, but it will not succeed.