Solana’s secret sauce seems to be programmed into its consensus mechanism, and it is called Proof-of-History (PoH).  Solana also uses a protocol called Turbine, which breaks up information into smaller bits, making it easier to process. This is similar to what Ethereum will be looking at implementing through what it has called “sharding”. Meanwhile, Ethereum still relies on a Proof-of-Work system. This means computational power has to be used constantly to create new blocks, which puts a strain on the network and requires much higher energy consumption. However, as we know, Ethereum is looking to change this and switch to a PoS system through its roadmap to Ethereum 2.0. This update consists of a three-step process that might not be completed for another 2 years. Currently, ETH has implemented the Beacon chain, which introduces staking on a “separate” network. The next step would be to merge these two chains, which is expected to happen sometime in the next few months of 2021. Lastly, Ethereum will introduce the above mentioned “shard chains”, which will enable Ethereum to process more transactions.

One of the reasons Solana competitors struggle to achieve higher transaction volumes is often due to the fact that miners or validators need to communicate with each other to figure out how to order blocks. Solana has solved this with a system of cryptographic time-stamping that currently can accommodate 65000 transactions a second, which is astonishing. That’s not a typo, and it is orders of magnitude more than Ethereum’s 30 transactions per second.  Nobody has come close to this, including Visa. Solana can, in theory, even carry out more transactions per second than Visa Inc., which by their own claims can carry out 24,000 transactions per second.

Therefore, the greatest appeal Solana has is its scalability, and the other is transaction fees. According to Solana’s website, the average transaction cost is around $0.00025 which is much cheaper than Ethereum. So there’s some brilliant technology behind this exceptional surge to be called as an “Ethereum Killer”.

Solana is gaining popularity now days primarily due to the massive increase in its price. The reason behind the popularity in recent months is due to its extensive scalability and mining efficiency, leading many to believe it to be the future leader of the DeFi landscape.  At the time of writing, by October 2021, the total market capitalization of Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) sold on the Solana blockchain has risen quickly to hit $753 million, closing in on the billion-dollar mark. Thanks to the explosive development of non-fungible tokens in Solana’s blockchain. The reason people like it more than Ethereum is simple – it’s cheap and very quick – users can mine NFTs at low cost, and there are hundreds of programs. Given that multiple DeFi ecosystems can sustainably co-exist in the future, we expect Solana blockchain to have its own set of fans. SOL, its native token, will benefit further as this fan base grows.

This contributes on why it is labeled as a beta mainnet; specific bugs, codes, and delays could be present. Yet developers and projects are still coming to the network to build or be part of it, like Solstarter, Serum Swaw, or Raydium. Along with that, the network had seen two major outages during the month of September. The second outage took hours to sort until enough network validators upgraded their version.