Solana ($SOL) Co-Founder: ‘We Want To See Ethereum Succeed’

On Tuesday (September 13), Solana Labs Co-Founder Raj Gokal gave an interview, during which he talked about both Solana ($SOL) and its biggest rival Ethereum ($ETH).

Gokal, who is the COO of Solana Labs, made his comments during an interview on  CoinDesk TV’s flagship show “First Move”.

Gokal was first asked about the reason for the spike in minting and seondary sales for Solana-based NFTs. He replied:

“From the beginning, Solana has had a focus on performance and the thesis was that back in 2017-2018 when CryptoKitties were really the breakout application that kind of strained Ethereum scalability and performance. The idea was that if something could have that kind of explosive demand, it’s probably going to be a thousand times that or 10,000 times that sometime in the future. So, Solana was really designed to be the most intuitive and snappy network for supporting those types of use cases.“

He then talked about how Solana-powered NFT marketplaces differentiate themselves from NFT marketplace built on Ethereum:

“Well, it’s interesting that you say more dominant because this past week was the first time that Solana NFT dollar volume exceeded Ethereum’s for a day. So that’s kind of rapidly changing, and it’s off the back of you know these great user experiences with Magic Eden and Hyperspace and Phantom, you know, really seasoned UX and product teams that have taken advantage of that performance and composibility of one big performant network and and build experiences that are super sticky. Retention is way higher on Solana than any other layer one blockchain.“

As for Ethereum and its upcoming Merge upgrade and how it might impact Solana, the Solana Labs COO said:

“There’s two sides of it. On one side, Ethereum and Bitcoin are the staples of crypto, and a rising tide for those two assets, those two ecosystems, I think inarguably lifts all boats. So, we want to see Ethereum succeed. We want to see the Merge succeed. It’s good for onlookers to the crypto industry to see big upgrades release and be successful.

“On the other side, it’s one step for Ethereum in a long roadmap toward having the type of scalability that Solana has today. Solana was built from the beginning with proof-of-stake. It’s as energy-efficient as half of a Google search per transaction, which is the best in the industry. And that’s really the problem that the Merge solves — just that transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. And Ethereum Foundation has said themselves it shouldn’t be expected that the Merge improves scalability or throughput or cost.

“And from our perspective, these NFT volumes just go to show users do really care about that cost and performance that speed and throughput. And so, excited to see the rest of Ethereum’s roadmap play out over the next decade or more.“