Justin Drake: Solana Will Not Overtake Ethereum

Initially conceived as a “killer” of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, the Solana network does not pose a threat to Ethereum and is not even a direct competitor. This view was shared by one of Ethereum’s core developers, Justin Drake, in an interview with CoinDesk.

According to him, competing with specialized networks in terms of throughput and transaction processing speed is not the task of the Ethereum blockchain, but rather of L2 solutions, which are designed for technical optimization.

“I think that L1 competes with Bitcoin, and L2 with Solana. Competing with it is not within the competence of L1. [Ethereum] should compete on security and operability,” the developer emphasized.

He stated that the recent Beam Chain update focuses precisely on enhancing resilience at the consensus level in the long term. Solana, in contrast, emphasizes performance without regard for system reliability. 

“Solana does not care about health. The only thing they care about is performance. They think about reducing latency and increasing throughput,” noted Drake.

In November, DEXs in the Solana ecosystem set a record monthly turnover exceeding $109 billion, and the native SOL price reached an all-time high amid prospects of an ETF launch.

In Drake’s view, at this stage of growth, the positive prospects for the “Ethereum killer” are coming to an end.

“Solana is now at the peak of its development, but I believe its golden era is nearing its end. Competitive advantages in speed and throughput may be lost due to architectural constraints that hinder further scaling,” the developer stated.

He also noted the importance of continuing to optimize L1 operations. In Ethereum, among other things, a mechanism for preliminary confirmations and BLOB objects have been implemented, and Beam Chain will add several more improvements.

However, Drake emphasized that the main priority for first-level blockchains should be security — the rest can be handled by systems built on top of L1:

“We need a super-secure, incredibly neutral L1, and then we need a very rich and dynamic L2 ecosystem.”

Back in November, at the Devcon 2024 conference, Vitalik Buterin discussed the prospects of Ethereum and the focus on L2.