Solana's impressive performance since the beginning of this year has increased its reputation in the industry and established it as one of the best blockchain networks. Despite enduring numerous failures in recent years, Solana has made significant improvements across the board, achieving 100% uptime year-to-date. At the time of writing, his TVL on the blockchain is double his number recorded in 2023, as he continues to push the boundaries of what is possible on blockchain networks.
Solana and Ethereum – Comparison
Solana, an open source project, relies on the truly decentralized nature of blockchain to provide efficient DeFi solutions, similar to Ethereum. However, Solana's low fees make it attractive to traders and developers alike. Currently, Ethereum is far ahead of Solana thanks to its vast ecosystem, but there are clear signs that Solana is catching up, especially amidst the meme coin's wild rise.
Last month, Solana meme coin trading volume reached $178 million, surpassing Ethereum's $138 million. Also, around March 4th, Solana overtook Ethereum in DEX trading volume. The former's trading volume has since increased to $2 billion, surpassing Ethereum's $1.8 billion. Ethereum retained its position again just 24 hours later, but this development increases the chances of Solana overtaking Ethereum in the long term.
Similar to Ethereum, Solana is extremely popular due to its speed and scalability, hosting a number of innovative crypto projects including meme coins. Currently, blockchain is still one of the top networks that can effectively scale to 1,000 transactions per second. In addition to speed and scalability, it also comes with developer-friendly features such as comprehensive documentation to enable projects to create new industry-standard features.
Essentially, Solana's developer-friendly ecosystem improves the experience for users and opens up valuable opportunities for integrations, partnerships, and exposure to diverse audiences.
Meanwhile, Ethereum maintains its dominance as the world's largest smart chain blockchain network. That said, Solana's level of growth in recent years has made it a major rival to Ethereum, with many suggesting it will take over the former in the long term.
How Solana caught up with Ethereum
Ethereum has established itself as one of the largest ecosystems thanks to its versatility and relevance across numerous sectors of blockchain. This network is used especially in his residential projects in the field of NFTs, DApps, DeFi and Meme coins.
Meanwhile, Solana has experienced significant growth recently, convincing some in the crypto community to influence the network to displace Ethereum as the largest blockchain.
Solana is showing promising signs of overtaking Ethereum to some extent as it is rapidly closing in on Ethereum. For example, in 2022, Ethereum controlled about 90% of the NFT market share. Market power decreased to 72.3% by 2023 as SOL and Bitcoin gained further momentum against Ethereum.
Since the third quarter of 2023, Solana shows no signs of slowing down in its pursuit of Ethereum. From Q3 to Q4 of this year, Solana NFT trading volume jumped 541% from $70 million to $450 million. However, despite the growth, as of December 2023, Solana only controls 7.4% of the market share in the NFT space, while Ethereum still controls about 72.3%.
Therefore, the diagram above shows that Solana still has significant growth to cover to overtake Ethereum in the NFT landscape. Similarly, in the DeFi environment, Ethereum controls $53.64 billion of the DeFi space's total value locked (TVL) of $95.49 billion. As a result, Solana only holds a small portion of the DeFi sector’s total TVL of $4.36 billion.
conclusion
In fact, Solana has experienced significant growth recently and is closing in on Ethereum across many sectors. Nevertheless, the goal of overtaking Ethereum may not materialize anytime soon. Ethereum is a vast and evolving ecosystem that is attractive to project developers as a result of its enabling infrastructure.
On the flip side, Solana's high throughput and low transaction fees make it an attractive network for developers. However, it still has a long way to go to catch up with Ethereum.
