Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain product after Bitcoin. But there are a few problems with Ethereum. Many people also believe Solana as the "Ethereum Killer". Well there are many blockchain products like Solana who are claimed to be "Ethereum killers". Many people also say that Solana and Ethereum can co-exit.
Why Solana?
Solana is backed by one of the most popular crypto exchange platform named FTX. They have chosen only Solana out of all the cryptos because of its speed. Look at this comparison chart to see the stats of Solana.
Problems of Ethereum
High gas fees
One of the major problem is its high gas fees. And certainly gas fees are important in a decentralized system. Even in my previous blogs, I have discussed about how Ethereum works and it completely demonstrates why gas fees are important as well as requried. But the average gas fees as you can see in this chart of Ethereum is 10000x from that of Solana.
Speed of transaction
Ethereum has much faster transaction speed than bitcoin but is is enough for a dapp? The average transaction per second (TPS) for Bitcoin is about 3 where as it is 15-20 for Ethereum. Well that's fast but it is nothing compared to that of Solana. Right now, Solana can handle about 65,000 transactions per second.
Blockchain Trilema
Ethereum team is trying to solve their problems of TPS and gas fees by methods called sharding, proof of stak. But Solana uses completely different mothod for its usage. Its known as proof of history. To understand the tech behind Solana, we at first need to understand about the Blockchain Scalability Trilema which is also known as the Blockchain Trilema.
Actually the founder of Ethereum i.e Vitalik Buterin himself coined this term. Any blockchain is based on 3 qualities which are Decentralisation, Security, Scalability. The trilema claims that 2 of these qualities can only be maximised. Ethereum and Bitcoin maximises Decentralisation and Security but had to compromise in scalability. Maximum blockchains follow the Blockchain Trilema.
But Solana claims a total different thing. It is decentralised, highly secure and also highly scalable. But the question is how does Solana achieve this? It's by implementing a whole new mechanism named as Proof of history.
Proof Of Work
In Proof of Work, computers just fight with each other to create the next hash and make a new block. Bitcoin takes about 10 minutes to create a new block while ethereum takes about 15 seconds. This speed is good for transactions since web 2.0 banks also take fairly the same time. But it is worthless for a Dapp. Suppose you make a social media and it takes 15 seconds to post a video or picture. So, if you are a miner then the better computer you have and the more computers you have, the more is the chance of getting the reward for computatation.
Proof of Stake
Proof of stake is a type of consensus mechanism used to validate cryptocurrency transactions. With this system, owners of the cryptocurrency can stake their coins, which gives them the right to check new blocks of transactions and add them to the blockchain.
Proof of History
Proof of History is a sequence of computation that can provide a way to cryptographically verify passage of time between two events. It uses a cryptographically secure function written so that output cannot be predicted from the input, and must be completely executed to generate the output. Here's a video which best explains what proof of history is and its from the official channel of Solana itself.