5 Major Differences Between Solana and Ethereum

In the battle of the blockchains, Solana and Ethereum have proved to be two valuable competitors.

Many blockchain experts have their opinions on which one is the best.

Does Solana’s transaction capabilities and scalability take the lead?

Or is Ethereum’s higher network stability a more valuable advantage?

In the end, it’s the user’s needs and preferences that determine which platform will be best suited for any particular project.

Let us take a look at the five major differences between Solana and Ethereum.

1. Transaction Speed

One thing blockchain users want in a blockchain is a high transaction speed.

It is obviously annoying to wait hours and days for a transaction to go through.

When it comes to transaction speed, Solana is the clear winner.

Ethereum can handle only about twenty to thirty transactions per second while Solana can handle thousands – even numbers like fifty thousand. The chief reason is the inefficient use of time and energy under the PoW (Proof of Work) verification process in Ethereum.

This huge difference in itself is enough to make you prefer one over the other!

In fact, Solana was brought into the blockchain world to develop a more modern solution to the transaction processing time challenges faced by Ethereum users. It can handle more transactions per second without crashing, something which Ethereum struggles with.

Meanwhile the PoS (Proof of Stake) “consensus mechanism” is much faster at processing transactions – one reason why impatient users love Solana!

However, as per the latest development, Ethereum 2.0 will employ the PoS mechanism instead of the PoW.

2. DownTime

By now you must be convinced that Solana is the better blockchain due to higher transaction speeds.

What else could possibly top that?

Solana might be fast but it struggles with an important thing – downtime.

If you are unaware of the term, downtime refers to the period during which a system is down or inactive.

Unlike Ethereum, Solana suffers dramatically when it comes to downtime – it is less stable and crashes a lot more while Ethereum has maintained a good streak in staying active and secure.

Since it is a relatively newer blockchain than Ethereum, it has suffered a lot more outages because of bots and an excessive number of transactions.

3. Programming Language

Solana and Ethereum also differ when it comes to the programming languages they use.

Ethereum uses Solidity while Rust is the most common programming language used by Solana.

While both of them are smart contracting languages, they tend to differ in a few aspects. Solidity’s syntax is similar to that of JavaScript and it is pretty popular. It is one of the first smart contracting languages and is easy to construct.

The Solana programming language Rust can be said to be more of an all-purpose language. It can be also used for many things other than creating “smart contracts”.

Because of this, it is said to be more versatile than Solidity.

4. Consensus Mechanism

As mentioned earlier, the new version of Ethereum uses only PoS while Solana merges the application PoH (Proof of History) with PoS.

With Proof of History, validators can verify or validate transactions more easily since they happen at a specific time.

Let us take a real-life example.

If you want to hold a reunion or meet up with a few people, you wouldn’t message them every hour trying to find out where they are or when they will be coming.

You will set a specific time so everyone knows when to meet up.

In the same way, when you look at how much time it takes to look through several blocks of transactions to find the right one, the PoH mechanism is definitely a lifesaver.