News Apr 19, 2024 08:59 PM EDT

Why Solana is Better Than Ethereum

By Isaiah McCall

Ethereum changed my life. More than my college degree, winning the flag football regional championship, or my managerial position at Denny's combined.

In 2020 I put all of my money into Ethereum - maybe $2,000 at the time - when it was $300 or so. I had read the Bitcoin whitepaper and Gigi's "21 Lessons Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole," but Bloomberg writer Matthew Leising's book "Out of the Ether" sold me on crypto.

Solana
(Photo : Unsplash) Solana

"The future was broken. Every person in this story knew this. Felt in their bones. Their views were well known and widely shared, yet nothing ever seemed to change. Capitalism was destroying the planet."
- Matthew Leising on the creation of Ethereum

I still love Ethereum.

But there's a better investment. That's Solana.

Ethereum Vs. Solana

Very quickly. If you're new:

What the hell are Ethereum and Solana?

Ethereum promises decentralized applications on distributed blockchain code that enables you to do more than buy and sell digital money, but also foster an ecosystem for decentralized finance, NFTs, and the metaverse.

Solana does the same, except it uses a system called Proof of History. Think Apple vs. Google. This has allowed Solana to handle 65,000 transactions per second with 400 millisecond block times - aka it's much faster - while Ethereum is at 11.75 tps. Solana's theoretical limit is 710,000 transactions per second, which is 30X that of billion-dollar financial giant Visa.

Many of you might not know all my stances on crypto. Here they are:

  • Bitcoin is the best long-term hold bar none
  • Ethereum is the best hold for saving humanity
  • Solana is the best investment this cycle (as for top 10 projects)

5 Metrics Where Solana is Better

A felt shift is occurring. Solana-which I have been very critical of since recommending it in 2021-now holds a 42.3% share of the stablecoin market, a significant leap from just 1.9% a year prior.

Solana is cheaper and faster, has more active users than Ethereum, is more Google-searched than ETH, and dominates the memes, DePIN, and has a slight lead in NFTs as well.

The price of Solana's token, SOL, has seen an impressive 781% increase year to date, outperforming everything in the top ten by a wide margin.


Metrics like "most google-searched" are fickle. Dogecoin or CumRocket could be the most searched for tomorrow. But SOL is flipping ETH in too many metrics to think this is capricious hype.

Because it's faster and (arguably) easier, SOL is an aesthetic judgment. It's the same reason Becky needs to have an iPhone as opposed to an Android.

I still think Ethereum will have a greater impact than Solana; it's more decentralized, has the most developers (by far) and after just coming back from Eth-Denver, the community is unparalleled.

But the times they are a-changin'.

Meme Snipping on Solana

Meme coins on Solana have a bigger market cap than the entire international Planet Fitness gym chain.

Last week meme tokens on SOL saw an astonishing influx of over $130M in presales to a collected market cap of $5.36Bn.

Among these meme tokens the most popular are:

  • Book of Meme: Some think it's the next Pepe or Shiba Inu.
  • Dogwifhat: Reached a 3 billion+ market cap in less than a month.
  • Smog: Seen explosive growth of 1,300%. With 490 million tokens ready to be airdropped.

Do I get this trend? No. Does anyone? Probably not. What I will say is that memes are the currency of the world. Very little has tangible value anymore. GameStop, a failing business, made thousands of people millionaires.

"When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." - Richard Dawkins

The US dollar is a meme. Donald Trump and Bitcoin started as memes.

Wait until Ice Spice or whoever has a SOL meme coin that moves in tandem with her career announcements on social media. This is where it's going.

To other people who have never experienced meme magic manifesting itself in real life, this must-read like some kind of schizoid talk, but it really isn't. Because of the digital world we now live in, memes are real currency.

Am I saying to bet the farm on Solana meme tokens? Yes. Wait. No. I mean, no. However, they are another big draw for mainstreaming crypto.

Can Solana Price Flip ETH?

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."
- Warren Buffett

When Solana's biggest supporter, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested in December 2022, SOL traded for $10. Now it's at $200.

So can SOL flip Ethereum?

Yes. But I don't think it will. In the same way that Ethereum flirted with overtaking Bitcoin like a pimple-faced nerd asking a cheerleader out to the prom, SOL will attempt the same.

The difference between Ethereum and others like Solana, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, or anything else is that Ethereum is the first network for smart contracts (aka decentralized apps) and, as such, is further ahead in development than any other.

Many developers and users complain about Ethereum's high fees, but fail to realize that the network is far ahead, focusing on offering its block space to other chains (L2s).

Ethereum has the undisputed monopoly in this area.

Plus, it's fully decentralized, unlike Solana - which still suffers from outages, though less - which is key for ETH's long-term security.

The articles are coming: "SOL: Is it Better than Ethereum?" and "Can SOL flip ETH?" I think solely because SOL will outperform everything in the top ten this cycle. This will add to the hype, creating a perpetuating cycle.

Bottom Line

I see a lot of middle-class grievances on X or Medium about how the world is unfair. It is. I get it.

But these people never offer solutions that will take them out of poverty and combat the autocratic Federal Reserve, fractional reserve banking system, or Google and Amazon's technofeudalism.

Crypto is much better than giving your money to banks so they can loan 10x that amount with interest.

Whether it is Ethereum or Solana, both are better investment vehicles and will disrupt the computing systems we have now. The question is will you take advantage of them?


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Ever since I was a child, it has been my dream to become a financial advisor. Unfortunately, it never came true. Therefore I am not a financial advisor and you should do your own research and not just listen to random people on the internet. Nothing contained in this publication should be construed as investment advice.


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