[bdickason]

Heavy user of ETH, SOL, Polygon (MATIC).

I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘eth or solana.’ I suspect that multiple chains will be useful for different applications.

For example, games which want super low latency will want a solution like solana. Even polygon slows down today and their usage numbers aren’t huge.

Solana has the fastest and cheapest transactions. That makes it my choice when it comes to defi apps.

I’m holding all 3 but I do think Solana has a great community and strong developer support.

[divs1210]

You didn't answer any of the questions, especially regarding decentralization. If there's going too be only a handful of validators, then it's as good as a centralized app hosted on AWS. Then how is it facilitating "DeFi", when there's no "De"?

[hanklazard]

I’ve read a lot about Solana and have considered trying to get a Validator up on their testnet.

I think the concern about centralization of the Solana chain is a real one. I don’t know what to say about the coin distribution in general and frankly that is my biggest concern with Sol. But in regards to validator centralization, I wonder how many validators would be required to assuage these concerns. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Currently there are 632 validators on mainnet Solana with the largest stake holding I see close to 5% (1). Compare that to the ETH mining pools where the top two pools almost have a majority of mining hashrate (2). I’m not trying to make a “whatabout” argument, just pointing out the relative decentralization in comparison to current Eth network.

With regards to the eth2 network, the comparison is a bit more straightforward. If we do a calc of the market cap / #ofvalidators, Sol has about 16M$ market cap per validator. I see 172,920 Eth2 validator deposits (3) so if the Merge happened right now, each validator would represent about 1.7M$ (=300B / 172920). So in this highly oversimplified model, Eth2 has about 10x as many validators as Sol.

This of course means nothing about real world outcomes as you could imagine large staking pools forming and the situation looking more like the BTC or ETH PoW chains with a few large groups dominating either Sol or Eth2

Anyway, for me, that’s actually kind of reassuring. Solana wants to push out more validators but block times are so fast that growing the network has some real technical challenges. If they can overcome those challenges, they’ll be reasonably decentralized with regards to the number of validators, at least compared to ETH.

1. https://solanabeach.io/validators 2. https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks 3. https://etherscan.io/txsBeaconDeposit?ps=50&sort=depositvalu...