Solana vs Ethereum: Differences

What is Ethereum?

Ethereum is a decentralized platform powered by blockchain technology. It works on a peer-to-peer network that executes and verifies Smart Contracts. ETH or Ether is the native currency of the Ethereum platform.

Transactional data stored on Ethereum is immutable as it is distributed across a network. Each transaction leads to an update of all the distributed databases after it passes a high-level verification process. Any tampering with the data will result in a mismatch with other databases leading to rejection of the tempered database. Further, the data storage is highly transparent as peers can look into each transaction.

This high security of the transactional data offered by Ethereum accrues value to Ether. This is because conducting transactions on Ethereum requires spending of ETH.

What is Solana?

As per Wikipedia – ā€œSolana is a public blockchain platform with smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL. Solana claims to offer faster transaction times and lower costs than its main competitor.ā€

The platform of Solana is designed to host decentralized, scalable applications. Where decentralization means the control and decision-making power is distributed to all the peers on the network rather than lying with a central authority.

On the other hand, scalability in a blockchain means the capacity to support a high load of transactions along with a large number of nodes in the network.

Ethereum Solana
Launched in
2013
2017
Founders
Vitalik Buterin
Anatoly Yakovenko proposed Solana in a white paper
Native Token
ETH
SOL
Programming Language
Solidity
Rust, C, C++
Consensus Mechanism
Proof-of-Work (PoW)**
Proof of Stake and Proof-of-History (PoH)**
Architecture
Stateful - The entire state of the network needs to be updated for each transaction
Stateless - the entire state of the network does not need updating for each transaction
Transaction Speed**
13-15 transactions per second(TPS)
50-65K transactions per second (TPS)
Scalability
Limited Scalability
High-Performance protocol for scalability
Market Cap*
$336,915,269,545.77 ($336 Billion)
$33,094,700,581 ($33 Billion)

*Market Cap or Market Capitalization is the value of a company being traded on a stock market. It is calculated by multiplying the total number of shares with the present share price. The valueĀ mentionedĀ aboveĀ is as on 4th May 2022.

**Ethereum 2.0 projects 100K transactions per second (TPS).