Parsec Weekly #103
There is no need to be upset: SOL/ETH
There is no need to be upset: SOL/ETH
Amid the fierce tribalism we’ve seen lately between the Ethereum and Solana communities, it seems as though much of slow but consistent progress made by EVM DeFi goes unnoticed.
It’s apparent that ETH price underperformance has clouded the view of many participants to the extent that they seem to conflate ETH price with the underlying development and success of the broader ecosystem (Ethereum mainnet itself and the EVM ecosystem writ large).
Don’t get me wrong, I have been a strong proponent of SOL price outperformance relative to ETH since Q3 2023 but that does not mean I can’t commend both respective chains on their objective merits.
There is no doubt that the user experience for almost any onchain action is superior on Solana. They have optimised the token trading experience and unsurprisingly volumes have followed with Solana doing $203 billion in trading volume vs Ethereum mainnet doing $63 billion in January thus far.
Howeveer, when we look beyond the swap one token for another usecase, EVM DeFi is clearly much more advanced and lindy. Most DeFi “innovation” we see tends to emerge first on Ethereum mainnet (or Base) before venturing further afield. Pendle, Ethena and the various examples of isolated lending markets are standout examples we have seen emerge recently. This is reflected in the significantly higher TVL Ethereum enjoys relative to Solana.
If you watch closely each chain/ecosystem seems to be slowly but surely establishing itself in its own lane:
Solana: the user friendly experience which lends itself to more retail-facing activities such as speculation/gambling and payments.
Ethereum: the slow moving oil tanker which lends itself to higher value DeFi activities and more institutional usecases like tokenisation.
In both cases, there is no need to be upset, in fact quite the contrary. It seems overwhelmingly positive to me that these two chains have crossed the chasm with respect to capturing unique use cases and user bases. An “us vs them” mindset which over-indexes on the SOL/ETH ratio plagues the mind and clouds the judgement; from where I’m sitting both ecosystems are doing just fine and I’m excited for what is to come.
On a final note, as new standards for interoperability come to the fore, it’s likely that we will continue to see Ethereum DeFi protocols export their products to more retail facing chains like Solana.