Solana needs a FireDancer, a ‘ChatGPT moment’ to challenge ETH, supporters say
A major upgrade to Solana aimed at increasing transaction processing this year, coupled with a “Discovery” consumer app, could be just what Solana needs to finally live up to its moniker as the “Ethereum killer.”
At least that's what Solana supporters believe, with a new wave of chain activity, an increasing number of developers and a growing number of users following the memecoin-led resurgence in December.
Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, told Cointelegraph that the turnaround could come from a flood of consumers building on Solana.
Federa says he recently noticed an increase in the number of developers looking to jump from Ethereum to Solana, lured by lower development costs and different coding languages.
“On Solana, anyone can write an interface in almost any programming language,” Federa said, adding that starting today, developers can code in Solana with Rust, C, and Python, with support for the Move language coming soon.
“That's not to say that Ethereum can't help it eventually, but today we're seeing a huge number of projects on Ethereum that want to cross over to Solana. It wasn't something we saw a year and a half ago.”
Federa said this makes him “very confident” that new consumer-facing applications will build the lion's share of Solana's growth in the coming years.
“Now are these going to be very useful applications? I do not know. But they will definitely be the most used apps,” he said.
Henrik Andersen, chief investment officer of Melbourne-based venture capital firm Apollo Crypto, had a similar prediction. While he's not sure if it's a “flip,” Solana says all it takes is for “ChatGPT to have a moment” and launch a highly successful app that attracts a large amount of users and capital.
“If Solana has a discovery app in SocialFi, DePIN or the gaming space, Solana can get enough interest to compete with Ethereum from that app alone.
Firedancer and Solana's Achilles heel
However, there is one challenge that Solana has been unable to overcome since its launch in March 2020.
On February 9, Solana's network experienced another extended network outage, causing the network to grind to a halt for five hours.
Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance crash, block progress is currently halted, while lead engineers and validators are actively investigating.
— Laine ❤️ stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) February 6, 2024
Originating from a bug in the code, the outage occurred because Solana only worked on two major clients, which many analysts say is the network's biggest weakness.
Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager at VanEck's Digital Assets Alpha Strategy, told Cointelegraph that Solana's customer diversity is the main hurdle the network needs to overcome if it wants to position itself as a serious competitor to Ethereum.
At the time of publication, Solana runs on two clients: the Solana Labs client and the Gitto Labs client, Gitto Code is a fork of the Solana Labs client.
Any mistake in Solana Labs' code could bring the network to a halt — which has happened at least ten times in the past few years.
Federa reiterated that reliability and uptime remain a “high priority” for Solana engineers, but argued that this is not the “best” criticism of the blockchain network.
“Critical financial infrastructure fails every now and then, right? It took a vacation schedule where people literally set their alarms,” he said.
Canada and Federa see Solana's upcoming FireDancer update — an all-new standalone client slated for release later this year — as reason to finally hope for Solana's turnaround. Canada added:
“I see Firedancer as a key enabler. If it ships, that's a huge deal for the network and I expect the valuation gap between ETH and SOL to narrow – and maybe SOL will eventually overtake ETH. If not shipped, I expect the Ethereum module roadmap to succeed.”
Maybe “flipping” is unlikely.
However, the gap between Solana and Ethereum is still huge.
As Solana has made a big rally over the past nine months, hitting a new yearly high of $133, Ethereum has rallied around the prospect of being included in the US-listed Ethereum ETF.
However, Ethereum is currently worth much more than Solana, with a total market capitalization of $404 billion, compared to Solana's $60 billion, according to TradingView data.
Andersen said the size and dominance of the Ethereum ecosystem makes it difficult to see Solana toppling in terms of market capitalization any time soon.
“One of the benefits of a modular ecosystem is the variety of players it attracts. Because of this, you will take over Solana Neuterem forever.
Meanwhile, Kanade said Ethereum's “long track record and large development community” means new developers are still more likely to choose Ethereum and its Layer 2s ecosystem to build apps, adding that Solana still has a “way to go” before it catches on.
Marc Smargon, founder and CEO of Layer1 blockchain Fuse Network, also said it's unlikely that Solana will surpass Ethereum.
“If we look at the long-term goal of Ethereum and the way that a decentralized economy is built from the bottom up, we can see that many ideas will go to Solana after being tested on Ethereum for the first time,” said Smargon.
“Ethereum is more of a ‘network of networks' game, while Solana is more user-centric. Both are big plays but not mutually exclusive. Some products and services on Solana may still be generated or operated in Ethereum,” he added.
Ultimately, Anderson says viewing the two networks as direct competitors may not be the best approach.
“Solana and Ethereum have different visions and ethos. One has the primary goal of being the fastest, Ethereum is building a censorship-resistant network. Both can be winners.”
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