Competitors eye a slice of Solana’s pie

Howdy!

Happy Labor Day to all our US-based readers. To everyone else, happy Monday.

I will personally be celebrating my own position as a laborer by eating several hotdogs. Wouldn’t have it any other way. That being said:

Competitors eye a slice of Solana’s pie

Looking at price, DeFi metrics, and vibes, Solana has arguably lifted its stock the most of any smart contract blockchain this market cycle.

But while Solana may be riding high for the moment, there are several competitors waiting in the wings. In conversations with multiple industry sources, Sui, Sei, Aptos, Monad, and Base all came up as potential Solana competitors — alongside Solana’s longtime foil, Ethereum.

For the moment, Solana is most often compared to Ethereum. The blockchain was regularly touted as the “ETH killer” by fans in its early days, and Solana and Ethereum have come to capture the majority of mindshare among non-Bitcoin chains. I’m not going to wade much more into a debate that has been hashed out several times already (and continues every day on social media). For the moment, Ethereum continues to be the best comparison point for Solana.

There are a host of other up-and-comers, though. Sui and Aptos are two layer-1 blockchains built on Move, a programming language developed by Facebook as part of its ill-fated crypto era. Proponents insist that Move is superior to both Rust, the language in which Solana is built, and Solidity, the coding language of Ethereum.

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Sui and Aptos both cost a fraction of a cent in average transaction fees and have average transactions per second (TPS) figures between 30 and 50, according to their block explorers. Solana’s non-vote TPS (that is, transactions that don’t involve validators reaching consensus) was averaging 500 and 750 TPS at press time, according to Solana Compass.

Solana’s product ecosystem also currently outshines what’s live on “expected alternatives” like Move-based layer-1s, Flipside Crypto’s charlie marketplace told me.

Sui and Aptos currently hold $611 million and $418 million in DeFi total value locked, compared to nearly $5 billion for Solana, according to DeFiLlama.

“[F]or any of these chains to truly become competitive, they’ll need a flourishing DeFi ecosystem or killer consumer apps,” Kairos Research co-founder Ian Unsworth said, adding that he still views Ethereum as the best “sparring partner” for Solana.

Telegram-linked TON has also become a buzzy blockchain for apps, buoyed by its connection to the ascendent messaging app and a crop of mini-games promising token airdrops. Two weeks ago, as $37 million flowed out of 21Shares’ European Solana ETP, $35 million also flowed into the firm’s TON-linked ETP. 21Shares told me they thought the two flows amounted to a rotation out of SOL and into TON.

It also just experienced some network downtime, which might just be a requisite to compete with Solana (ducks).

Monad said it hit 10,000 TPS in testing, and it announced a $225 million mega-round earlier this year. The chain claims to be increasing throughput by executing EVM transactions in parallel, but it is yet to be released into the wild, so there’s only so much you can say here.

Perhaps Solana’s biggest competitor won’t prove to be a layer-1 blockchain at all.

“What stands out to me is not the L1s competing with Solana but L2s,” charlie marketplace said, adding that they’re intrigued by Eclipse, a new Ethereum rollup trying to run the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) on Ethereum.

Switchboard co-founder Chris Hermida pointed to “exchange L2s” as serious Solana competitors due to their large distribution.

“It’s no surprise that a lot of builders were choosing between Solana and Base given user mindshare / distribution,” Hermida wrote in a text.

— Jack Kubinec