Ethereum vs. Solana Comprehensive Research Report: A Panoramic Comparative Analysis of the King of Public Chains’ Defender and Challenger, Covering Their Ecosystems, Technical Architectures, Ecological Strategies, Governance Philosophies, and Development Challenges

In recent years, the competitive landscape of public chains has undergone significant changes. With Ethereum’s ecosystem showing few paradigm innovations similar to DeFi in this cycle, and the gradual divergence of Layer 2 development from the mainnet expansion goals, the market has been filled with numerous doubts about Ethereum.

Meanwhile, Solana, as a representative of high-performance public chains, has performed outstandingly in this cycle. Especially driven by high-frequency asset interaction scenarios and meme culture–fueled model innovations, the Solana ecosystem has gradually emerged as a challenger to Ethereum.

From a macro perspective, this report will start from the different underlying technical architectures of Ethereum and Solana to explore how their distinct technical routes and governance philosophies may give rise to different public chain ecosystems.

At the same time, it will discuss the possible paths through which blockchain might achieve sustainable development in the future.

From a micro perspective, this report will refine the research granularity to the extreme. We will present to readers the five key factors that truly affect blockchain network security, performance, and usage costs; the formulas determining network fees for Ethereum and Solana; the dozens-of-times difference in capital turnover rates between Ethereum and Solana; and other detailed insights.

In summary, this report will provide readers with a comprehensive panoramic view of the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems from multiple macro and micro perspectives, helping them clearly understand the present and future of the reigning king of public chains and its challenger.

Development Background

Since 2014, when Ethereum introduced smart contracts to the underlying public chain, dozens of competing chains claiming to surpass Ethereum have emerged over nearly a decade. However, Ethereum, as the innovation frontier of smart contracts and decentralized applications, has monopolized the underlying public chain sector with an absolute advantage, and its status as the king of public chains has never been shaken.

However, starting in 2021, Ethereum began focusing mainly on the PoS mechanism and vigorously developing the Layer 2 ecosystem. Application innovation on the Ethereum mainnet started to decline, and some developers shifted to Layer 2. Yet, after nearly two years of development, the once highly anticipated Layer 2 has not produced paradigm-shifting application innovations, nor has it demonstrated a clear enhancement effect on the Ethereum mainnet. The community has observed more resource consumption and utilization of the Ethereum mainnet by Layer 2, with an increasing sense of separation between Layer 2 and the Ethereum mainnet.

At this point, different voices began to emerge within the Ethereum community, with some starting to question Ethereum’s technical roadmap.

Meanwhile, subtle changes began to appear in the market. More and more high-performance competing chains started to take action, promoting themselves as fast and inexpensive application-level public chains, attracting many developers willing to experiment. Stimulated by the meme culture speculative frenzy and the explosive on-chain data generated by high-frequency asset interaction scenarios, people began to care less about Ethereum’s once-promoted decentralization slogan.

The smart contract market once monopolized by Ethereum has gradually been eroded by high-performance public chains, and Ethereum’s position as the king of public chains has started to be challenged. Among the challengers, Solana stands out the most.

Over more than a decade since the emergence of underlying public chains, debates over which technical architecture is superior have never ceased, and questions about public chain governance remain unanswered.

Now, with the excellent performance of high-performance public chains represented by Solana in this cycle clearly overshadowing the initial generation public chain—Ethereum—people are compelled to revisit fundamental issues such as underlying technical architectures and governance models.

Therefore, this report will first start with the underlying technical architectures of Ethereum and Solana, gradually extending to their respective on-chain ecosystems and governance styles, and based on this, explore the possible future development trends of underlying public chains and upper-layer applications.

Comparison of Ethereum and Solana’s Technical Architectures

The underlying technical architecture of public chains involves multiple aspects. The theme of this report is to explore how different technical architectures impact public chain ecosystems differently.

The factors most closely related to ecosystem applications are network security, network performance, and network usage costs. The main factors influencing these three metrics are the public chain’s consensus mechanism, execution model, network architecture, node admission policies, and fee mechanisms. Therefore, this section will focus on these five dimensions, without going into other technical details.

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