One of the main developers of Ethereum is confident that Solana, often called the “Ethereum killer,” is not actually a threat to it and is not even a direct competitor

“Ethereum’s Beam Chain is all about long-term improvements to the health and security of the consensus layer,” says Drake.

Developer Ethereum Justin Drake said his overarching proposal to overhaul the second-largest blockchain's consensus level is not about catching up to competitors, but about staying in the market for the long haul.

Drake unveiled the proposal, known as Beam Chain, at Ethereum's annual biennial Devcon conference in Bangkok last month, at a time when the network's native token ETH is lagging behind its peers on other major layer 1 blockchains.

The Ethereum network has gained widespread adoption over the past few years, making it more expensive and slower to use. In response, a group of layer 1 blockchains known as "Ethereum killers" emerged in 2020, rivaling Ethereum in transaction speed, and Solana became the leader among them.

"Solana doesn't care about performance"

Recently, activity on Solana has increased sharply, mainly due to the surge in popularity of memcoins on the blockchain. Users are wondering if Solana will be able to overtake Ethereum and become a “hot” network.

But Drake said he doesn't see Solana as a threat to Ethereum. He also doesn't see Beam Chain as a way to regain Ethereum's edge in the short term.

Beam Chain is “focused on improving the long-term health and security of the consensus layer, it has nothing to do with performance,” Drake told CoinDesk.

“Solana doesn’t care about health. The only thing they care about is performance. They care about reducing latency and increasing throughput,” Drake added.

Ethereum has tried to solve the scalability problem by promoting a rollup-focused roadmap. This means users can transact faster and cheaper across multiple secondary networks known as layer two or rollups. To popular rollups based on Ethereum include Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and ZKsync.

Ethereum developers relied heavily on the second layer to enable faster transactions and lower fees.

«Я думаю, что первый уровень конкурирует с Биткоином, а второй уровень конкурирует с Соланой. Таким образом, в задачи первого уровня не входит конкуренция с Соланой, — сказал Дрейк. — Мы должны конкурировать в области безопасности и здоровья. Таким образом, если и есть какая-то конкуренция с Соланой, то она должна исходить от приложений и второго уровня».

Например, у Arbitrum время между блоками транзакций, публикуемыми в сети, составляет 250 миллисекунд. «Это быстрее, чем у Solana», — сказал Дрейк. (Согласно недавнему исследовательскому отчёту Galaxy Digital, «Solana нацелена на время между блоками транзакций в 400 миллисекунд, хотя на практике оно обычно составляет 500–600 миллисекунд».)

However, Drake added that there are some Ethereum layer 1 features that developers are working on that will make Ethereum more competitive in speed compared to Solana.

Основные из них — это «предварительные подтверждения», которые ускоряют подтверждение транзакций и должны сделать работу пользователей Ethereum такой же удобной, как в Solana, а также «блоки» — функция, которая позволяет Ethereum обрабатывать большие объёмы данных о транзакциях вне блокчейна. Но всё это отдельно от Beam Chain, которую, по словам Дрейка, он надеется внедрить к 2029 году.

And while Solana is gaining traction, Drake said he's shrugging off the hype and is focused on long-term benefits for Ethereum.

“Solana is having its moment of glory now, but I think this will be the end of the golden era of Solana because all of Solana's competitive advantages in latency and throughput will disappear due to fundamental differences in architecture that do not make it scalable,” Drake said.

A representative for Solana did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Ultimately, Drake says his main goal is to create an “internet of value,” and Beam Chain is what he believes is needed to achieve that goal.

“We need a super secure, incredibly neutral first layer, and then we need a very rich and vibrant second layer ecosystem that brings the application to users,” he said.