Why Solana is still considered the Ethereum Killer

Ethereum is the second-largest crypto worldwide by market capitalization, aka the whole value of ETH coins in circulation, which stands at $186.94B at the time of writing. It comes second only after Bitcoin, which boasts a figure of $1.33T and over 19M coins circulating. Ethereum is trading at around $1,567 and has a circulating supply of around 120.68M ETH. Despite recent price fluctuations, the project’s prevalence persists thanks to its essentiality in decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, smart contracts, and decentralized applications (dApps). These developments have risen to global popularity and acceptance, being used in areas like governmental policy regulation, property ownership, supply chain management, and the list goes on. And even though these achievements make it hard to imagine any crypto surpassing Bitcoin as the leader, along comes Solana. 

Solana is a super-performant public blockchain platform created to support dApps with rapid, safe, and scalable solutions. Transactions are impressively fast, with the mean block time standing at only 400 milliseconds, meaning that 65K transactions are processed per second in top conditions. A focus on real-time apps, cheap transactions, and high transaction processing speed secures a competitive advantage and contributes to its favorable comparison to Ethereum. The latter can be costly at times, when congestion spikes, with the expenses known as gas fees making many developers and users shift to Solana or wait for the proper moment to deploy and improve apps on Ethereum. 

Each crypto has its own characteristics that make it unique and valuable in the market, which is why so many novice and experienced investors flock to it. This article breaks down the basics of both networks, underscoring the main differences between them so you can learn where both stand in the crypto world in 2025.

Solana’s Proof of History

Solana’s Proof of History consensus model helps Solana process the ~65K TPS and stands out from other predecessors thanks to its capacity for ensuring a good order of events. This nature allows Solana to be super decentralized—more decentralized than Ethereum—given that all nodes can agree on the sequence of events within the network. 

In short, the consensus mechanism uses a “time” concept and a Verifiable Delay Function that works by applying a time label to blocks and then using the function to prove the time when the timestamp was added. The timestamp is a hash of former PoH and blocks create a chronological block order in the decentralized chain, thus managing to monitor the whole network and be stored and checked by every node in the network.

Compared to Ethereum’s PoS, nodes need to sync their clocks, which is a laborious activity that theoretically reduces transaction throughput. This is a reason why, despite the Merge, Ethereum struggles to process 30 TPS. Expectations are that it will process around 100K TPS when the last sharded version appears. 

In spite of the sophisticated computations in Solana’s PoH, the higher number of transactions is possible thanks to the nonexistence of time synchronization errors. Therefore, PoH presents a favorable solution to scalability issues.

Ethereum’s Proof of Stake

Ethereum first used a Proof of Work consensus model, like Bitcoin has done and continues to do. This protocol is associated with huge environmental concerns given the massive amounts of energy consumed and the carbon footprint realized, which has consistently had environmentalists and eco-aware individuals throw shade at the industry. Nevertheless, Ethereum ended this practice when it shifted to the Proof-of-Stake system after the completion of the Merge upgrade, managing to slash consumption by 99.9%. Now, the system isn’t spared of limitations. Ethereum intended to be more secure and decentralized, but it achieved these goals by compromising on its scalability. Such inefficiencies led to the need for more nodes to validate every transaction. In 2021, when Ethereum’s capacity to support high activity and demand lagged, transaction fees skyrocketed, which reduced the network’s appeal for basic transactions. 

Given that Ethereum strives to disrupt the current technological landscape, its impossibility of scaling is a real issue. The dev team tried to solve this problem, too, when shifting to PoS, but failed. The new protocol works by picking validators proportionally with the amount of ETH staked, and eliminates the costly fees in PoW. Scalability has leveled up, but not enough to help Ethereum achieve that leading-business goal established. The final sharded version that Vitalik Buterin, co-founder at Ethereum, expects could raise the number of processable transactions per second to 100K TPS. This upgrade follows the Dencun update and is known as “The Surge” – a rollup-centric roadmap that fuses data compression solutions, superior data availability, and layer-2 (L2) scaling solutions. 

Solana strong points 

Solana has a number of use cases and advantages, of which the following stand out:

• Solana was developed with scale in mind, which has differentiated it from other blockchains from the start. It’s built to host more users and verify transactions quickly without compromising the platform’s operational capacity.

• Solana rejoices over the support and commitment from the investor and developer communities, which has attracted both institutional and retail investors. 

• Solana’s gas fees cost around $0.02; a decent price compared to Ethereum’s changing but generally high fees.

• By last year’s final, Solana offered more than 440 dApps, boasting first-rate flexibility. 

Ethereum strong suits 

Ethereum has several promising advantages, including: 

• It facilitates smart contracts, aka self-executing contracts that close deals when pre-established criteria are met. Ethereum is the leading platform for these contracts, marking a remarkable breakthrough for DeFi. 

• Ethereum enjoys fantastic support from its community and massive online popularity, which promises a constant focus on the platform’s steady improvement. 

• Developers favor Ethereum because of the number of apps offered that don’t rely on involvement from third parties like banks, brokerages, or governmental bodies. Using dApps reduces the likelihood of downtime.

• Ethereum has been a leader among the crypto when it comes to saving energy and overall sustainability since 2022. 

In conclusion

While Ethereum remains a powerful force in the crypto world thanks to its widespread use in DeFi and smart contracts, Solana keeps gaining traction due to its impressive scalability, speed, and low transaction costs.