Does Ethereum see Solana as a competitor? This was one of the big questions during the panel discussion, “’Unified Ethereum’ vs. ‘L2 Ecosystem Competition’: Can We Have Both?” with the main leaders and builders within the Ethereum ecosystem.
- The panel discussion is part of Devcon Week 2024’s main event, Devcon Southeast Asia 2024, which took place from November 12 to 15 in Bangkok, Thailand.
In focus: “‘Unified Ethereum’ vs. ‘L2 Ecosystem Competition’: Can We Have Both?”. speak about the “frenemy” dynamics between competing L2 ecosystems and how this can lead to a fragmented user experience. There was also a question and answer portion where questions were asked. The panelists were:
- Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the major blockchain giant Ethereum.
- Ben Jones the co-founder of Optimism, a well-known layer two (L2) for Ethereum.
- lamb heart, the co-founder of Risk Labs, the foundation behind the Across and UMA protocols on Ethereum.
- Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, contributor to Arbitrum, an L2 scaling solution on Ethereum.
- Jesse Pollak Vice President of Engineering at Coinbase and creator of Base, a decentralized Ethereum L2 incubated by Coinbase.
Recent news: In the Philippines, Solana is searched more compared to Ethereum, based on PH Google Trends data from September 21 to October 21, 2024.
The following extract From the discussion panel the panelists’ responses are shown on whether they see Solana as a competitor to Ethereum.
Panel Discussion: Does Ethereum See Solana as a Competitor?
Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs: Okay, I’ll answer this. Solana, look, I don’t hate Solana at all. I think Solana offers a service to Ethereum by showing another way, right? And honestly, we should learn from that, respect it and compete.
Competition is a beautiful thing. My take here is that after Danksharding with blobs, any individual L2 has a similar experience to Solana. It’s fast and cheap, like Solana, and it’s pretty.
How’s that, right? These guys, Jesse, Steven, Ben, also have a similar background to Solana. The problem is that now there are too many and we have to unify them.
Is it a competitor? Sure, but I think Ethereum has much more scale, thanks to its rollup-focused roadmap.
Steven Goldfeder, co-founder and CEO of Offchain Labs: I just want to echo that competitive point. I’m very happy that Solana exists because it really pushes us to ask, “How do we get these good features from Solana without compromising what we consider essential?” That’s always important. Competition is important.
I am also very happy that there is optimism because Arbitrum would not be as fantastic as it is today if nothing pushed us to be competitive. And I’m sure it’s a two-way street too.
I love the competition within the ecosystem and I think we, as Ethereum, are lucky to have competitors. But we are still better than our competitors.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum: Another thing I want to say about competition is that we shouldn’t just think about competition within the blockchain world. SEPA is competition. The credit card system is competition. That new BRICS Pay that was announced a week or two ago is competition. The centralized world is moving forward and blockchain has to remain cheaper than Bitcoin. Arguments that were very easy to make in 2012 are much more difficult to make today. And the world is moving on now, right?
The range of things we have to think about for decentralization and privacy has expanded: 10 years ago it was websites, and now we’re talking about AI, and in 20 years, we might be talking about reading our minds. So, you know, the world moves forward and we absolutely have to move forward to keep up.
Jesse Pollak, VP of Engineering, Coinbase: Alright, I’m going to give that a big plus. Outside the chain it is competition and within the chain, we are building together. It’s time to build a global chain economy, so let’s build it.
You can watch and listen to the full panel discussion in the video below:
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