Solana founder: People will never be far from Ethereum, protocols will naturally evolve towards multi-chain development!

Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, the two founders of Solana, were interviewed on the podcast "Unchained" this Monday. During the interview, they discussed the current advantages of users utilizing Solana, its relationship with Ethereum, and potential future developments.

Differences Between Solana and Ethereum

Supported by the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the public chain Solana has seen significant growth this year in both coin price and on-chain lockup volume. The high Gas Fees on Ethereum have led some users who cannot afford it to turn to Solana.

During an interview, the host asked how Solana distinguishes itself from Ethereum given the plethora of similar protocols in the market.

Co-founder of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, explained that developers prefer minimal extraction and the fastest settlement layer when deploying smart contracts. We are building a very fast, high-performance execution layer, but settlement is also included in it.

When discussing the current strengths and weaknesses of Ethereum, Raj Gokal believes that Ethereum's current strengths come mainly from the "first-mover advantage" and market share. The main weakness lies in the slow transition of the consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Potential for Solana to Surpass Ethereum?

Since its development, Solana has been dubbed the "Ethereum killer." This year, Neon Labs announced the deployment of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on Solana, allowing users to benefit from low transaction fees and use protocols originally deployed on Ethereum. When asked if this would lead users to abandon Ethereum in favor of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko stated:

People will always come back to Ethereum, and the benefit of Solana being EVM-compatible is that developers can use Solidity to build more applications.

Anatoly Yakovenko also added that protocols will naturally move towards multi-chain development, accelerating the process for original Ethereum developers and Neon. This is because development teams no longer need to split their teams and use a different programming language to develop protocols just to deploy their brand on a new chain.

Raj Gokal mentioned this as the "Game Theory Optimal," where if the old public chain teams are unwilling to split their teams and learn a new language for the new chain, naturally, someone will fork the existing protocol and deploy it on a new chain to attract new market users.