Ethereum developer Justin Drake mentioned his complete proposal to overtake the second-largest blockchain’s consensus layer is not about catching up with a rival, it is about sticking round for the lengthy haul.
Drake unveiled the proposal, generally known as the Beam Chain, at Ethereum’s biennial Devcon gathering in Bangkok final month, at a time when the community’s native token ETH is lagging behind its counterparts at different main layer-1 blockchains.
The Ethereum community loved vast adoption over the previous few years, making it costlier and slower to make use of. In response, a cohort of layer-1s, generally known as “Ethereum killers,” emerged in 2020 to compete with Ethereum on transaction speeds, and Solana has been seen because the chief of the pack.
Not too long ago, exercise on Solana has exploded, primarily due to the surge of memecoins on the blockchain, with customers questioning whether or not it’ll overtake Ethereum because the “sizzling” chain.
However Drake mentioned he doesn’t see Solana as a menace to Ethereum. Neither does he see the Beam Chain as a strategy to restore Ethereum’s edge within the brief time period.
The Beam Chain “is all about enhancing the long-term well being and safety of the consensus layer, it has nothing to do with efficiency,” Drake mentioned in an interview with CoinDesk.
“Solana has no consideration for well being. The one factor they care about is efficiency. They care about lowering latency and growing throughput,” Drake added.
Ethereum has tried to handle the scalability problem, by pushing ahead a rollup-centric roadmap, which means customers can transact sooner and extra cheaply on a bunch of auxiliary networks, generally known as layer-2s or rollups. In style layer-2s on high of Ethereum embody Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and ZKsync.
Ethereum builders have closely relied on the layer-2s to supply sooner and decrease transaction charges.
“I feel the layer-1 is competing with Bitcoin, and the layer-2s are competing with Solana. And so it isn’t even a part of the remit of the layer-1 to even compete with Solana,” Drake mentioned. “We must be competing on safety and well being. And so if there’s any competitors to Solana, it wants to return from the functions and from the layer-2s.”
Arbitrum for instance, has a slot time, or time between blocks of transactions being printed to the chain, of 250 milliseconds. “That’s sooner than Solana,” Drake mentioned. (In response to a latest analysis report from Galaxy Digital, “Solana targets slot instances of 400 milliseconds, although they sometimes vary from 500-600ms in observe.”)
Drake did add, although, that there are some options for Ethereum’s layer-1 that builders have labored on that may make Ethereum extra aggressive on pace with Solana.
The primary ones are “pre-confirmations,” which pace up the affirmation of transactions and are speculated to make the consumer expertise on Ethereum as clean as Solana’s, in addition to “blobs,” a characteristic that permits Ethereum to course of massive batches of transaction information off-chain. However these are all separate from the Beam Chain, which Drake has mentioned he’s hoping to implement by 2029.
And whereas Solana is seeing plenty of momentum, Drake mentioned he’s tuning out the noise to give attention to long-term positive aspects for Ethereum.
“Solana is having its second proper now, however I feel it should be the tip of the Solana golden period, as a result of the entire aggressive benefits that Solana has round latency and throughput are going to soften away due to elementary variations in structure that do not make it scalable,” Drake mentioned.
A Solana spokesperson didn’t reply to a request for remark by press time.
Finally Drake mentioned, his North Star is to create an “web of worth,” and the Beam Chain is what he thinks is required to realize that.
“We want a super-secure, extremely impartial layer-1 after which we want a really wealthy and vibrant ecosystem of layer-2s that deliver the appliance to the customers,” he mentioned.
Learn extra: High Ethereum Researcher’s Dramatic Proposal Attracts Standing-Room-Solely Crowd
