Solana and Avalanche are fantastic L1s, and I am optimistic for their future. But I'm skeptical of their ability to replace Ethereum.
To Solana's credit, they opted to create their own smart contract VM based on Rust, rather than build an EVM-compatible VM. It will take them time to get developer mindshare, but there's a real possibility to build dApps on Solana that couldn't exist on Solana. The same is true in some ways for Avalanche, but I think their current EVM-compatible C-chain means most developers will spend their time porting existing Solidity-based dApps, rather than build something new or novel. Look at Fantom and its DAG-based blockchain.
Having used Arbitrum, Boba, and Optimism, I can say that they're very fast and work very well. How they handle load as we scale up remains to be seen.
I still have to spend time with the zkRollup L2s; sad to see that StarkNet gets mentioned before Loopring. Polygon's investment into the space is interesting too.
To me, lower fees are irrelevant if there are no dApps to use, and low liquidity. I'm an avid user of a very promising dApp on Arbitrum that has done very well since launching in August. However, they're looking to launch on Avalanche now due to the low liquidity and uptake on Arbitrum.
What that also tells me is that momentum matters. And right now, Ethereum has got it. You won't be bridging your NFTs from Ethereum into Solana anytime soon. But on the L2s? Yeah, probably.
> To Solana's credit, they opted to create their own smart contract VM based on Rust, rather than build an EVM-compatible VM. It will take them time to get developer mindshare, but there's a real possibility to build dApps on Solana that couldn't exist on Solana.
Good point. What are your thoughts on Cardano, Algorand and Tezos?
Interesting points about AVAX's C-chain and Fantom as well. I have a friend who did a project on Fantom due to lower gas fees and it also being EVM compatible, but yeah, it's using Solidity.
Also, just wondering, do you agree with this quote from the article?
> What most people don’t know is: Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high. The goal for Etheruem is not to be the chain most consumers transact on. It’s to be the settlement layer for a number of other chains sitting on top of it, which can run much faster and much cheaper, because they’re backed by Ethereum’s security and infrastructure. In other words: the consensus layer for a variety of networks.
I'd also be curious to hear once you have time to look into zkRollup L2's.
To Solana's credit, they opted to create their own smart contract VM based on Rust, rather than build an EVM-compatible VM. It will take them time to get developer mindshare, but there's a real possibility to build dApps on Solana that couldn't exist on Solana. The same is true in some ways for Avalanche, but I think their current EVM-compatible C-chain means most developers will spend their time porting existing Solidity-based dApps, rather than build something new or novel. Look at Fantom and its DAG-based blockchain.
Having used Arbitrum, Boba, and Optimism, I can say that they're very fast and work very well. How they handle load as we scale up remains to be seen.
I still have to spend time with the zkRollup L2s; sad to see that StarkNet gets mentioned before Loopring. Polygon's investment into the space is interesting too.
To me, lower fees are irrelevant if there are no dApps to use, and low liquidity. I'm an avid user of a very promising dApp on Arbitrum that has done very well since launching in August. However, they're looking to launch on Avalanche now due to the low liquidity and uptake on Arbitrum.
What that also tells me is that momentum matters. And right now, Ethereum has got it. You won't be bridging your NFTs from Ethereum into Solana anytime soon. But on the L2s? Yeah, probably.