Solana vs Ethereum: what is the difference?

Solana and Ethereum are both blockchains that run smart contracts, and both are secured by staking. Ethereum is older. Solana was built later for speed and low fees, and it has stopped working several times.

Side by side

The coin guides for each give the current figures.

Speed and cost

Ethereum's main network can be slow and costly when busy. Its answer is layer 2 networks, which process transactions cheaply and record their data back on Ethereum.

Solana aims to do the same on one network. It uses a technique called proof of history, a continuous chain of calculations that gives the network a shared record of the order of events.

Track record

Solana has had outages. The network stopped for about 17 hours in September 2021 and for several hours at a time in May and October 2022.

Ethereum's best-known failure was in an application built on it. In 2016 an attacker drained more than 3.6 million ETH from a fund called The DAO.

Supply and staking

Both coins have no maximum supply. New SOL is created each year to pay validators and stakers, at a rate designed to fall towards 1.5%. New ETH is issued to validators, and part of every fee is destroyed, so the total can rise or fall.

On Solana you stake by delegating to a validator, and the validator does not gain control of your tokens. On Ethereum, running a validator needs 32 ETH. With less, your choices are a pool or an exchange.

Shared risks

Both carry smart contract risk, sharp price swings and the danger of signing something harmful. Lesson 37 covers approvals.