The battle of Layer 1 chains has been raging on since 2020, in the middle of DeFi Summer. Before the 2021 bull run, with L1 chains, Ethereum was undoubtedly the behemoth of decentralized finance (DeFi). It made sense, since it has first-mover advantage. But the times, they are a-changin'. And being the first isn't always good. See, Ethereum's architecture has been creaking under the thousands of dApps built on top of it. In the Ethereum white paper, Vitalik laid out what’s now commonly known as the blockchain trilemma. In essence: You can have speed, scalability, and security, but not all three at once. (Ah the Three S's.) This is the problem that we've been trying to resolve with all the different L1 blockchains.

And one of the most hyped contenders of them all is probably Solana. Sure, Solana is the new kid on the block(chain). But despite being just a baby, it's attracted a horde of pitchfork-holding haters (and smart-money-following VC lovin' investors too). Let's ignore price movement for a second, though. Instead, we should take a closer look and attempt to determine which one is the better blockchain.

Ethereum's Proof-of-Work consensus is based on an auction model, so users compete by bidding to have their transaction included in the next block. During times of network congestion, you can imagine the nightmarish bidding scenarios this model can create. And insane gas fees on Ethereum can harm transaction volume. Combine this with its PoW consensus mechanism. This involves mining, and mining is energy-intensive. That's why, with Ethereum's Merge (formerly 'Eth2.0'), the network is transitioning to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), purportedly in a couple of months’ time.

Why is PoS believed to be better than PoW? Well, for one, it's less energy-intensive. See, instead of running specialized hardware equipment, validators for PoS consensus need to have a certain minimum amount of native tokens staked in the chain. The amount of ETH you've got staked in the network ensures that you won't act against your own interest. The reasoning is that you wouldn't act as a malicious actor to compromise the same network you're invested in. In exchange, you're rewarded for helping secure the network. Solana already uses PoS, by the way. And it combines it with this innovative little mechanism called Proof-of-History (PoH). We'll get more into PoH below, when we discuss scalability. For now, know that both SOL and ETH can be staked on their respective networks. But for Solana, combining two consensus mechanisms makes its network highly performant.

So what does this mean when a user transacts on the blockchain? Well, it feels like the future. It's fast. (Like, bullet-train, this-doesn’t-feel-like-a-blockchain fast.) And don't even get me started on transaction costs. A transaction fee on Solana is peanuts. As far as downtimes go, Ethereum benefits from being an OG blockchain, having had lots of technical kinks ironed out in its early days. While the network can get congested at times, it never goes down, thanks to being significantly more decentralized than most chains. In fact, it's part of the reason Ethereum has had such a hard time scaling.

The project still wants a typical crypto user to be able to run an Ethereum node on normal hardware. Vitalik clearly addressed the limitations of its L1 network in the Ethereum white paper. Solana, on the other hand, is clearly still experiencing growing pains. To date, the chain has suffered several downtimes since its launch. It's worth looking a bit closer at these incidents. All the shutdowns appear to have been caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) Attack. A DDOS attack occurs when a malicious actor attacks a network with the aim of overwhelming it.