Avalanche and Solana are blockchains that have one of the largest ecosystems and communities in the industry. For example, at the time of writing this article, AVAX and SOL communities currently move $525 million and $912 million in 24 hours. Also, both networks are constantly developing optimized decentralized applications in sectors like DeFi, NFTs, P2E games, and DAOs.
However, we can’t simply compare them only by their economic results, because they have very different in many features. Therefore, this article will have a closer look at how they work and what are their projections for the future.
What is Avalanche’s Blockchain?
Avalanche is a high-performance, scalable, secure, and PoS blockchain, where users can make an eco-friendly transaction in less than 2 seconds that costs a fraction of a cent.
According to a January 2022 report, Avalanche had 17.7k developers and its projection is to continue growing.
However, Avalanche is not only backed by its community, but also by Ava Labs which has an experienced team-leading Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Google, Morgan Stanley, AT&T, and NASA, among others.
Moreover, in Avalanche, developers have the flexibility to code private and public smart contracts. They can develop scalable dApps with fungible and non-fungible tokens in them. In other words, Avalanche has the following features:
- Scalable: This means that any Avalanche’s dApp can be used by a lot of people worldwide without sacrificing its performance. So people can make a large number of transactions because Avalanche can support 4500 TPS for each subnet.
- Secure and Decentralized: Avalanche is the first permissionless blockchain that can be truly secure when 51% of miners are attacked by hackers. Nowadays, it has 1.2k validators which earn 9.8% yearly.
- Participate in its governance mechanism: Anyone who holds AVAX has one vote to decide on its governance proposals, and also to make voting proposals. However, unlike other blockchains, Avalanche doesn’t allow unlimited changes to its system.
- Interoperability: Avalanche is designed to connect with other blockchains to import balances, and support the execution of smart contracts, among others.
You’ve built or want to build on your own custom #Avalanche Subnet, but how do you scale it to market? Learn how @Covalent_HQ, @ChainstackHQ and Vesterålen Havbruk Technologies, one of the largest white fish producers, have integrated Subnets.https://t.co/WKxy6tzZw9 pic.twitter.com/J0TfbiaQIJ
— Avalanche 🔺 (@avax) May 3, 2022
For example, debridge is a cross-chain protocol that has already developed bridges that connect Avalanche with Ethereum, BNB Chain, HECO, Arbitrum, and Polygon.
Another important bridge protocol compatible with Avalanche is Wanchain which can connect Avalanche with other blockchains like Bitcoin, Polkadot, Moonriver, Ripple, Dogecoin, Fantom, and EOS.
More About Avalanche
Avalanche has a PoS consensus mechanism that is scalable, secure, and decentralized. Also, Avalanche is energy efficient because it doesn’t need special hardware.
Also, the only indicator that proves how decentralized is a blockchain, is the Nakamoto Coefficient. In the case of Avalanche, it is 26, considering that this blockchain has almost 1.2k validators.
On the other hand, Avalanche has achieved the following developments:
- Avalanche has developed the “Avalanche Multiverse”. A $290 million incentive program that wants to incentivize subnet adoption.
- There are more use cases for AVAX like the new partnership with Arweave, where you can buy permanent storage with AVA tokens or build dApps with Avalanche as the backend.
- 1inch Network is now on Avalanche.
- Avalanche will start supporting native Bitcoin.
- Terra added Avalanche to its UST reserve.
Moreover, AVAX is the native token of Avalanche and, at the time of writing this article, is currently trading at $61.16 with a marketcap of $16.4 billion with $479 million traded in the last 24 hours. Moreover, its current price has decreased 57.8% from its ATH and increased, by 2084% from its ATL.
Also, it’s circulating, and the total supply is 268.7 and 377.7 million tokens in AVAX. You can buy AVAX on many exchanges like crypto.com, HitBTC, Binance, WOO Network, BingX, and Digifinet. On the other hand, you can use AVAX for the following use cases:
- Validator rewards.
- Stake rewards.
- Governance votes.
- Transactions fees.
On an #Avalanche Subnet, games developers can customize a high throughput blockchain for elevated gameplay. That means fast transactions, smooth UX and cost-efficient scalability. Let's build ⬇️ https://t.co/qWjFx2AR3e
— Avalanche 🔺 (@avax) April 30, 2022
Finally, nowadays, Avalanche’s ecosystem has 191 decentralized applications (dApps) in sectors like culture, DeFi, Enterprise, Exchange, Infrastructure, Tools, and Wealth Management. For example, platforms like 1inch, Aave, Binance, Bitfinex, and Cartesi support Avalanche.
Moreover, Avalanche has a native bridge platform that is in its beta and works with Metamask, Coinbase, and WalletConnect.
What is Solana’s Blockchain?
Solana was created in 2017 and is also a decentralized blockchain where developers can build scalable, and user-friendly dApps. Nowadays, every transaction fee costs $0.00025 with 2192 TPS (transactions per second), with a maximum TPS of 700,000 that will depend on how the software continues development.
These optimized conditions have made Solana one of the fastest-growing blockchains in the entire ecosystem with a wide variety of dApps in DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs, among others. The team behind Solana is Solana Labs, which supports it technically.
1/ Solana was built to be an incredibly energy efficient chain.
The most recent energy impact report from @SolanaFndn found that a Solana transaction uses around the same energy as a few Google searches – 2,707 Joules, to be precise. https://t.co/5spnJt8fHl pic.twitter.com/t3v4Y2WpZu
— Solana (@solana) April 22, 2022
Moreover, one of the most interesting features of Solana is that projects will fully integrate with Solana’s solid layer 1 platform. This means that dApps will be more secure and stable over time. Also, another important thing to consider is that Solana is censorship-resistant. This means that Solana was made to resist external measures that want to limit it. In other words, Solana’s architecture aims to satisfy three very important properties: Scalability, security, and decentralization.
Also, in Solana, nodes are called clusters, an independent group of computers that works to preserve the record of events, creating a decentralized ledger to make it impossible to erase.
On the other hand, the main feature of Solana is its innovative consensus mechanism. They developed a “proof-of-history” concept where nodes can verify the time and order of events (transactions). This consensus is a variation of PoS (proof of stake), which uses a cryptographically secure function that records every feature of every transaction chronologically in its blockchain. This sequence is verified by clusters. As you can see, Solana’s consensus is different from many blockchains, including Avalanche.
More About Solana
In the case of Solana, this blockchain has 1249 validators, and the Nakamoto Coefficient is 19. However, that’s a small number right now. Just to give you an idea, right now there are 342k validators for ETH 2.0.
The reason that there is so much difference in the number of validators is the cost to build one. Nowadays, there are many alternatives to building a node in Ethereum, from renting a node in AWS for a monthly payment or buying everything yourself which can cost at least $2500.
Moreover, here are Solan’s latest developments:
- Rarible, a multichain NFT marketplace, just added Solana.
- Solana developed a hackathon called Riptide.
- Phantom, the most popular Solana wallet, launched its Android version.
- The Solana Conf was placed in Miami.
- OpenSea, the most popular NFT marketplace, just added Solana. They are starting with a beta version.
On April 30th, Solana's Mainnet Beta cluster suffered a 7 hour outage caused by stalled consensus. Below is an investigation into the cause of the outage, and the steps core developers are taking to increase network resiliency and stability. https://t.co/pfkMTEwPda
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 3, 2022
On the other hand, SOL is the native token of Solana and, at the time of writing this article, is currently trading at $87.60 with a marketcap of $29.2 billion with $980 million traded in the last 24 hours. Moreover, its current price has decreased 66% from its ATH and increased, 17,359% from its ATL.
Also, it’s circulating, and the total supply is 334 and 508.1 million tokens. You can buy SOL on many exchanges like crypto.com, HitBTC, Binance, WOO Network, BingX, Digifinet, among others.
Moreover, you can use AVAX for the following use cases:
- Validator rewards.
- Stake rewards.
- Governance votes.
- Transactions fees.
Finally, Solana has a very diverse ecosystem that currently has more than 1500 dApps from different sectors like NFTs, wallets, DEXs, and web3 apps, among others. For example, very popular dApps like Phantom, Audius, Orca, Serum, Raydium. Solanart, Solend, among others.
Conclusion
After having analyzed the 6 factors, we can conclude that both blockchains have a tremendous potential to scale sustainably in the short and long term.
However, through the time they have been developing, we can see that Avalanche is the one that has shown the least vulnerabilities in its execution, which is finally what remains in the minds of the crypto community. Therefore, we believe that so far, Avalanche wins in this comparative article. Here is a comparative analysis of them:
- Features: We consider that Avalanche wins because, in reality, Solana had some hacking problems and the recent shot down that drastically limited its trust in users.
- Consensus Mechanism: Solana’s consensus is different from many blockchains, including Avalanche. Solana wins this factor.
- Decentralization Level: Building a node in Avalanche costs right now 200 AVAX ($12,200) to open. However, in Solana, it can cost you between 4.5k-7.5k USD, mainly because of the hardware requirements. Avalanche wins this factor.
- Latest Developments: From this news, Avalanche wins this section. It shows more important milestones.
- Tokenomics: Nowadays, Solana’s marketcap and 24-hour trading volume are much higher, which means that its ecosystem and community are growing faster. Solana wins this section
- Ecosystem: Solana’s ecosystem has more diversified dApps for more sections. Solana wins this section
By this, we do not mean that Solana will continue to have capital leaks by hackers, as we are sure that this blockchain will be correcting this. Therefore, we recommend that you develop the habit of following the development of these blockchains through their social networks and continue to understand their fundamentals.
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