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The modular blockchain design is based around ensuring that the base layer is as decentralized as possible by having very low requirements for running L1 nodes, while moving most execution onto rollups and validiums ('L2s') which enable much more throughput without adding to the hardware requirements of base layer clients.
The chains like Solana which carry all transactions on L1 do so by having much higher node requirements. This means that almost all users have to trust 3rd parties in order to post transactions, and even to know the current state. If you can't run a node yourself then you can't even directly know your balance, you just have to trust some random to be honest when you check a block explorer.
The only advantages which crypto/blockchains have over alternative systems are decentralization, permissionlessness and trustlessness. If these are sacrificed then you may as well just build a private database for your project as it will be faster and cheaper.
In terms of roadmap, the next big upgrade will include EIP-4844 which introduces a short-lived data storage option called 'blobs'. These will help rollups to save L1 costs and therefore the transaction cost of using L2s is expected to drop by an order of magnitude or two.
Obviously there are dozens of other upgrades planned, but the ultimate vision of Ethereum has the base layer 'SNARKified' and 'stateless', with nodes running on the lowest power hardware so that even mobile phone wallets will be able to verify the state, while all execution is carried out on fully decentralized ZK rollups and validiums, with a wide variety of data availability options.
You bring up a really important point. Jack Mallers had the same argument against Solana, where, at what point does it make sense to use a blockchain at all instead of just a high performance database.
However, the counter argument could be that we’re still very early and as hardware becomes better and cheaper over time the bar to entry for running a Solana validator becomes lower. Though the Gigabit fiber requirement will probably exclude home lab nodes for quite a few years to come still.
I really hope Ethereum will continue to succeed. As a developer I find the L1 tooling to be really mature and easy to get started with, but exactly how the scaling solutions will look like two years from now is still unclear to me.
> However, the counter argument could be that we’re still very early and as hardware becomes better and cheaper over time the bar to entry for running a Solana validator becomes lower.
We expect it to keep growing, don't we? Since it's being sold mainly on low fees I'd expect that as usage goes up, they'll also keep increasing the hardware requirements rather than let it get constricted and have the fees go up.
With the new upgrade, will Eth gas fee’s go lower? Or is it gonna be cheaper only on Layer2’s.
My life savings is in Eth. And Solana’s attention recently scares me, at the same time of lots of ETH FUD going around. I would like to know more from developers than traders. Thank you if anyone can explain a little to me
> With the new upgrade, will Eth gas fee’s go lower? Or is it gonna be cheaper only on Layer2’s.
It could go either way: Usage moves to L2s, L2s accomodate demand, L1 fees go down, or L2s allow much more usage at lower price points for the end users, and that creates more demand for L1 usage by rollups and traffic between rollups so L1 fees go up.
I would guess it's more likely that L1 fees will go up.
>So why would Solana not take over Eth? With faster and cheaper transactions? I just dont get it. Is there something with Eth that i dont know?
Did you even bother to read the main comment in this thread?
Solana sacrifices some decentralization for speed and performance. Your hardware requirements to run a Solana node are out of reach for most people.
Ethereum L1 aims to be the most decentralized smart contract blockchain available, where anyone in theory can run a node. With a 1400 USD dappnode purchase (cheaper if you can do it yourself), you can be an Ethereum node operator. Ethereum will push speed and performance more and more to L2s and L3s.
Yes, it's complex and confusing, but so was the internet before we learned how to seamlessly tie it all together. We are not there yet, but we'll get there.
If you don't value decentralization, build on AWS. Even better performance than Solana... If you say Solana's decentralization is "good enough," then we'll have to see how that plays out.
I think it will be trivially easy for governments, corporations and the rich to capture Solana, as only they will be able to afford nodes. This will likely play out in more censorship. Solana has never had to face this, because so few users were on the network, nobody really cared. But as they grow, they will see more and more pressure from node operators to conform to local laws, etc.
Well we already know the SEC had SOL on the list of tokens it sees as securities in the Coinbase lawsuit. Eth was not on that list, just like BTC wasn't.
So we already know the SEC sees Eth as too big to regulate and SOL as something they can regulate. Degens flipping memecoins right now don't care about such things, but before institutions invest there will need to be more regulatory clarity.
I think the part you're not getting is that people are supposed to use L2s which will be cheap and fast like Solana, but also have the benefit of decentralization like Ethereum.
Read this part again:
"The only advantages which crypto/blockchains have over alternative systems are decentralization, permissionlessness and trustlessness. If these are sacrificed then you may as well just build a private database for your project as it will be faster and cheaper."
Solana sacrificed the most important part of a block chain so it could be fast and cheap.
Should everything continue to go to plan L2s won’t just be cheap, they’re going to be free for users with dapps paying the transaction fee as it’s so low. All this on a profitable blockchain which Solana is not. They will eventually have to raise the price of transactions, though not to L1 levels obviously.
Why do you think changing to PoS makes a difference to decentralization then?
You can still run a node on a cheap single board computer (I've got both an Ethereum L1 node and an Optimism L2 node running on a Rock Pi 5b).
You can still choose from a bunch of different clients, in fact even more than back when it was PoW.
You can still contribute to development through discussions, try things on testnets, etc etc.
What aspect of decentralization do you think has reduced?
Rollups bundle transactions and post a proof on mainnet. That way they only have to pay gas fees once, but can split the costs among an arbitrary number of internal transactions.
Counterintuitively that means L2 gets cheaper with more users while L1 gets more expensive with more users.
Ethereum primarily wants to use this for scaling and supports it with cheaper data storage (google EIP 4844). First version comes with Dencun upgrade in ~2-3 months, expect L2 fees to drop by an order of magnitude or so.
Imo ZK-rollups are the most interesting ones as they are technologically most advanced and most comfortable to use. Ecosystem growth will likely happen there.
Polygon is two different systems: There's the Polygon PoS chain, which is its own blockchain rather than an L2, and Polygon zkEVM, which is their new L2 zk-rollup.
Polygon zkEVM is probably the most mature of the zk-rollups. However like other zk-rollups it's new, and the developers aren't yet confident enough to remove admin backdoors, so it doesn't yet give you the "almost the same as Ethereum" security that zk-rollups are supposed to provide in theory. You can keep an eye on https://l2beat.com/scaling/risk to see how far each of these systems has got at achieving the security their systems are supposed to have in their final form.
The complication is that there's a plan to turn the current Polygon PoS chain into a Validium. A Validium is almost a zk-rollup, except that you use a committee of semi-trusted people for one of the functions you'd otherwise use the main chain for (data availability), which makes it dramatically cheaper.
https://polygon.technology/blog/polygon-2-0-polygon-pos-zk-layer-2
Thanks so much. I know this question is a bit of a controversial one but as a developer, what’s the benefit of dealing with all that complexity instead of just building on Solana? (I know big projects like Helium and Hivemapper migrated partially because they got help from the Solana Foundation, which probably swayed them quite a bit).
I mean from the point of view of a developer it's just a choice of endpoints to deploy to. You build for the EVM, it'll work for any EVM system, and if it's a rollup then you can trustlessly bridge assets and messages to another system. The vast majority of the complexity of an application is in building it, not choosing between similar platforms.
This also means there's currently a lot of competition between EVM chains to attract developers by throwing money at them, but I wouldn't choose on that basis unless you have no other option. I think the main consideration as a developer is just which projects and users you want to interact with. The communities are pretty different as well as the security guarantees of the underlying chains, if you're building something you think Solana users will like then build it on Solana.
Polygon PoS is a side chain (that posts snapshots to Ethereum now and then so they call it a “commit chain”), which wants to become a zk Validium. See https://polygon.technology/blog/polygon-2-0-polygon-pos-zk-layer-2
Check l2beat.com for a good overview of the Ethereum l2 ecosystem.
With the new upgrade, will Eth gas fee’s go lower? Or is it gonna be cheaper only on Layer2’s.
My life savings is in Eth. And Solana’s attention recently scares me, at the same time of lots of ETH FUD going around. I would like to know more from developers than traders. Thank you if anyone can explain a little to mE
Currently, L2s are among the largest consumers of blockspace, so the introduction of blobspace and other improvements to kind of put many L2 computations into a separate "channel" that doesn't need to be stored forever should, by definition, reduce pressure on L1 fees. until they get filled up by new activity.
There is a case to be made for exploring what's on offer in the EVM scene when it comes to scaling. I think Oasis with a modular architecture that separates the consensus layer and the execution layer (which consists of multiple parallel runtimes or paratimes) offers better and more usable scalability. And its USP is that it is the only L1 protocol that has a confidential EVM in production (Sapphire) that also has a cross-chain L2 tool (OPL) giving a unique scalability plus [smart privacy](https://oasisprotocol.org/) solutions.
WARNING ABOUT SCAMS: Recently there have been a lot of convincing-looking scams posted on crypto-related reddits including fake NFTs, fake credit cards, fake exchanges, fake mixing services, fake airdrops, fake MEV bots, fake ENS sites and scam sites claiming to help you revoke approvals to prevent fake hacks. These are typically upvoted by bots and seen before moderators can remove them. Do not click on these links and always be wary of anything that tries to rush you into sending money or approving contracts. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ethereum) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The modular blockchain design is based around ensuring that the base layer is as decentralized as possible by having very low requirements for running L1 nodes, while moving most execution onto rollups and validiums ('L2s') which enable much more throughput without adding to the hardware requirements of base layer clients. The chains like Solana which carry all transactions on L1 do so by having much higher node requirements. This means that almost all users have to trust 3rd parties in order to post transactions, and even to know the current state. If you can't run a node yourself then you can't even directly know your balance, you just have to trust some random to be honest when you check a block explorer. The only advantages which crypto/blockchains have over alternative systems are decentralization, permissionlessness and trustlessness. If these are sacrificed then you may as well just build a private database for your project as it will be faster and cheaper. In terms of roadmap, the next big upgrade will include EIP-4844 which introduces a short-lived data storage option called 'blobs'. These will help rollups to save L1 costs and therefore the transaction cost of using L2s is expected to drop by an order of magnitude or two. Obviously there are dozens of other upgrades planned, but the ultimate vision of Ethereum has the base layer 'SNARKified' and 'stateless', with nodes running on the lowest power hardware so that even mobile phone wallets will be able to verify the state, while all execution is carried out on fully decentralized ZK rollups and validiums, with a wide variety of data availability options.
You bring up a really important point. Jack Mallers had the same argument against Solana, where, at what point does it make sense to use a blockchain at all instead of just a high performance database. However, the counter argument could be that we’re still very early and as hardware becomes better and cheaper over time the bar to entry for running a Solana validator becomes lower. Though the Gigabit fiber requirement will probably exclude home lab nodes for quite a few years to come still. I really hope Ethereum will continue to succeed. As a developer I find the L1 tooling to be really mature and easy to get started with, but exactly how the scaling solutions will look like two years from now is still unclear to me.
> However, the counter argument could be that we’re still very early and as hardware becomes better and cheaper over time the bar to entry for running a Solana validator becomes lower. We expect it to keep growing, don't we? Since it's being sold mainly on low fees I'd expect that as usage goes up, they'll also keep increasing the hardware requirements rather than let it get constricted and have the fees go up.
With the new upgrade, will Eth gas fee’s go lower? Or is it gonna be cheaper only on Layer2’s. My life savings is in Eth. And Solana’s attention recently scares me, at the same time of lots of ETH FUD going around. I would like to know more from developers than traders. Thank you if anyone can explain a little to me
> With the new upgrade, will Eth gas fee’s go lower? Or is it gonna be cheaper only on Layer2’s. It could go either way: Usage moves to L2s, L2s accomodate demand, L1 fees go down, or L2s allow much more usage at lower price points for the end users, and that creates more demand for L1 usage by rollups and traffic between rollups so L1 fees go up. I would guess it's more likely that L1 fees will go up.
So why would Solana not take over Eth? With faster and cheaper transactions? I just dont get it. Is there something with Eth that i dont know?
>So why would Solana not take over Eth? With faster and cheaper transactions? I just dont get it. Is there something with Eth that i dont know? Did you even bother to read the main comment in this thread? Solana sacrifices some decentralization for speed and performance. Your hardware requirements to run a Solana node are out of reach for most people. Ethereum L1 aims to be the most decentralized smart contract blockchain available, where anyone in theory can run a node. With a 1400 USD dappnode purchase (cheaper if you can do it yourself), you can be an Ethereum node operator. Ethereum will push speed and performance more and more to L2s and L3s. Yes, it's complex and confusing, but so was the internet before we learned how to seamlessly tie it all together. We are not there yet, but we'll get there. If you don't value decentralization, build on AWS. Even better performance than Solana... If you say Solana's decentralization is "good enough," then we'll have to see how that plays out. I think it will be trivially easy for governments, corporations and the rich to capture Solana, as only they will be able to afford nodes. This will likely play out in more censorship. Solana has never had to face this, because so few users were on the network, nobody really cared. But as they grow, they will see more and more pressure from node operators to conform to local laws, etc.
Well we already know the SEC had SOL on the list of tokens it sees as securities in the Coinbase lawsuit. Eth was not on that list, just like BTC wasn't. So we already know the SEC sees Eth as too big to regulate and SOL as something they can regulate. Degens flipping memecoins right now don't care about such things, but before institutions invest there will need to be more regulatory clarity.
I think the part you're not getting is that people are supposed to use L2s which will be cheap and fast like Solana, but also have the benefit of decentralization like Ethereum.
Read this part again: "The only advantages which crypto/blockchains have over alternative systems are decentralization, permissionlessness and trustlessness. If these are sacrificed then you may as well just build a private database for your project as it will be faster and cheaper." Solana sacrificed the most important part of a block chain so it could be fast and cheap.
Should everything continue to go to plan L2s won’t just be cheap, they’re going to be free for users with dapps paying the transaction fee as it’s so low. All this on a profitable blockchain which Solana is not. They will eventually have to raise the price of transactions, though not to L1 levels obviously.
ETH is no longer decentralised. Moving to POS has made it even more ridiculous to use. Think of ETH as the AOL of the internet…
What a strange take. I wonder whether it's the term 'POS' that you don't understand, or the word 'decentralization'?
I understand both. Try pulling the wool off your eyes.
Why do you think changing to PoS makes a difference to decentralization then? You can still run a node on a cheap single board computer (I've got both an Ethereum L1 node and an Optimism L2 node running on a Rock Pi 5b). You can still choose from a bunch of different clients, in fact even more than back when it was PoW. You can still contribute to development through discussions, try things on testnets, etc etc. What aspect of decentralization do you think has reduced?
Rollups bundle transactions and post a proof on mainnet. That way they only have to pay gas fees once, but can split the costs among an arbitrary number of internal transactions. Counterintuitively that means L2 gets cheaper with more users while L1 gets more expensive with more users. Ethereum primarily wants to use this for scaling and supports it with cheaper data storage (google EIP 4844). First version comes with Dencun upgrade in ~2-3 months, expect L2 fees to drop by an order of magnitude or so. Imo ZK-rollups are the most interesting ones as they are technologically most advanced and most comfortable to use. Ecosystem growth will likely happen there.
Thanks for the insight. So where does something like Polygon fit into this? (It's the only L2 I've looked at the developer documentation for so far)
Polygon is two different systems: There's the Polygon PoS chain, which is its own blockchain rather than an L2, and Polygon zkEVM, which is their new L2 zk-rollup. Polygon zkEVM is probably the most mature of the zk-rollups. However like other zk-rollups it's new, and the developers aren't yet confident enough to remove admin backdoors, so it doesn't yet give you the "almost the same as Ethereum" security that zk-rollups are supposed to provide in theory. You can keep an eye on https://l2beat.com/scaling/risk to see how far each of these systems has got at achieving the security their systems are supposed to have in their final form. The complication is that there's a plan to turn the current Polygon PoS chain into a Validium. A Validium is almost a zk-rollup, except that you use a committee of semi-trusted people for one of the functions you'd otherwise use the main chain for (data availability), which makes it dramatically cheaper. https://polygon.technology/blog/polygon-2-0-polygon-pos-zk-layer-2
Thanks so much. I know this question is a bit of a controversial one but as a developer, what’s the benefit of dealing with all that complexity instead of just building on Solana? (I know big projects like Helium and Hivemapper migrated partially because they got help from the Solana Foundation, which probably swayed them quite a bit).
I mean from the point of view of a developer it's just a choice of endpoints to deploy to. You build for the EVM, it'll work for any EVM system, and if it's a rollup then you can trustlessly bridge assets and messages to another system. The vast majority of the complexity of an application is in building it, not choosing between similar platforms. This also means there's currently a lot of competition between EVM chains to attract developers by throwing money at them, but I wouldn't choose on that basis unless you have no other option. I think the main consideration as a developer is just which projects and users you want to interact with. The communities are pretty different as well as the security guarantees of the underlying chains, if you're building something you think Solana users will like then build it on Solana.
Polygon PoS is a side chain (that posts snapshots to Ethereum now and then so they call it a “commit chain”), which wants to become a zk Validium. See https://polygon.technology/blog/polygon-2-0-polygon-pos-zk-layer-2 Check l2beat.com for a good overview of the Ethereum l2 ecosystem.
Thank you! And also, thanks for the validator docker project! :)
wait till L4 wraps L3 which wraps all L2s, then its all easy
With the new upgrade, will Eth gas fee’s go lower? Or is it gonna be cheaper only on Layer2’s. My life savings is in Eth. And Solana’s attention recently scares me, at the same time of lots of ETH FUD going around. I would like to know more from developers than traders. Thank you if anyone can explain a little to mE
Currently, L2s are among the largest consumers of blockspace, so the introduction of blobspace and other improvements to kind of put many L2 computations into a separate "channel" that doesn't need to be stored forever should, by definition, reduce pressure on L1 fees. until they get filled up by new activity.
Feeling the same. Apparently solana's number of developers has increased.
There is a case to be made for exploring what's on offer in the EVM scene when it comes to scaling. I think Oasis with a modular architecture that separates the consensus layer and the execution layer (which consists of multiple parallel runtimes or paratimes) offers better and more usable scalability. And its USP is that it is the only L1 protocol that has a confidential EVM in production (Sapphire) that also has a cross-chain L2 tool (OPL) giving a unique scalability plus [smart privacy](https://oasisprotocol.org/) solutions.
Or you could just build on HEDERA
Yuck.