Bitrabo Editorial
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, announced a significant milestone where SOL has exceeded Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency globally, in an essential indicator – the economic barrier for honest nodes participating in consensus.
Solana’s Dominance Over Ethereum with 10X Margin in This Indicator
Yakovenko highlighted that the economic barrier for honest nodes to engage in consensus within Solana is currently ten times higher than that of Ethereum. Both Ethereum and Solana depend on a network of distributed computers, known as nodes, to validate and record transactions, ensuring the blockchain’s performance and security through a process called consensus.
Yakovenko emphasized that not all nodes are equal, and participating in the blockchain’s consensus process comes with a significant cost, often inflated by expenses related to powerful hardware and energy consumption.
The higher costs of running nodes on Solana are primarily attributed to Ethereum’s investments in Boneh-Lynn-Sacham (BLS) aggregation for consensus messages.
The BLS scheme utilized by Ethereum is a cryptographic signature scheme facilitating users to validate the signer’s authenticity, allowing independently verified messages by node validators.
Information from Ryan Berckmans, an Ethereum community member, disclosed the substantial expenses associated with running a Solana validator, with the Solana Foundation currently offering financial support due to the validator costs exceeding $65,000 annually.
Yakovenko aims to implement a more efficient consensus mechanism to address the soaring voting fees, anticipating a decrease in costs per vote as hardware advancements lead to reduced expenses in sending validator messages to the entire cluster, thus lowering Solana’s economic barrier for node participation.
Moreover, by establishing voting subcommittees, vote fees could potentially be reduced, and the vote load could be lessened by rotating boxes within the committee.
ETH and SOL Experience Mild Retreat
Recently, both Ethereum and Solana have witnessed minor declines in their prices, signaling a decrease in demand within the cryptocurrency market. Solana registered a notable weekly decrease of 12.91%, dropping its price to $150.5.
Despite the market volatility and decreased investor demand, analysts like Ali Martinez are optimistic about Solana’s future performance, forecasting a potential price surge of up to 53% for the cryptocurrency.
Conversely, Ethereum has seen a continual decline in value, despite the SEC’s recent approval of Spot Ethereum ETFs. Ethereum’s current price stands at $3,485, marking a significant weekly drop of 9.49%.