Solana needs Firedancer

A major upgrade on Solana aimed at increasing transaction processing this year, paired with a potential “breakthrough” consumer app, could be all that’s needed for Solana to finally live up to its moniker as an “Ethereum killer.”
That is, at least, what Solana’s proponents believe amid a fresh wave of on-chain activity, increasing developer count and a growing number of users, boosted partly by a memecoin-led resurgence in December.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Austin Federa, head of the strategy at the Solana Foundation, said a flippening could come from a flood of consumer-facing applications built on Solana.
Federa said he’s recently noticed an increase in the number of developers looking to make the jump from Ethereum over to Solana, lured by lower development costs and a more diverse array of coding languages.
“On Solana, anyone can write an interface in almost any programming language,” Federa said, noting that as of today, developers can code on Solana with Rust, C and Python, with Move language support coming soon.

Federa said this is something that’s made him “extremely confident” that the lion’s share of new, consumer-facing applications will be built on Solana in the coming years.
“Now, will these be the most valuable applications? I don’t know. But they will almost certainly be the most widely used applications,” he said.
Henrik Andersson, chief investment officer of Melbourne-based venture capital firm Apollo Crypto, had a similar prediction. While he wasn’t as confident of a “flippening,” he said all it may take is for a Solana to have a “ChatGPT moment” and launch a hyper-successful app that draws in a significant amount of users and capital.

Firedancer and Solana’s Achilles heel

However, there’s one challenge that Solana, since launching in March 2020, has failed to stamp out.
On Feb. 9, the Solana network suffered another prolonged network outage, bringing the network to a grinding halt for nearly five hours.

Stemming from a bug in the code, the outage occurred in large part due to Solana only running on two major clients, something many analysts say is the network’s biggest weakness.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Pranav Kanade, a portfolio manager at VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Strategy, said Solana’s client diversity is the main hurdle the network has to overcome if it wants to position itself as a serious competitor to Ethereum.
At the time of publication, Solana runs on two clients: a Solana Labs client and a Jito Labs client, with Jito’s code being a fork of the Solana Labs’ client.
Any bug in the Solana Labs code can grind the network to a halt — which has happened at least 10 times over the last few years.
Federa reiterated that reliability and uptime remain the “highest priority” for Solana engineers but argued that this also wasn’t “the best” criticism of a blockchain network.
“Critical financial infrastructure goes down all the time, right? It has scheduled downtime that people literally set their alarms by,” he said.
Kanade and Federa see Solana’s upcoming Firedancer upgrade — an entirely new independent client scheduled for releaser later this year — as a reason to be hopeful for an eventual Solana flippening.

Maybe “flippening” unlikely after all

However, the gap between Solana and Ethereum is still sizeable. 
While Solana’s SOL  has staged a massive rally over the last nine months, reaching a new yearly high of $133, Ether has rallied, too, amid hopes of being included in United States-listed spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs).However, Ether’s value is currently still far above SOL’s, touting a total market capitalization of $404 billion, compared to Solana’s $60 billion, per TradingView data. 
Andersson said that the size and dominance of the Ethereum ecosystem make it difficult to foresee Solana flipping it in terms of market cap any time soon.
“One of the benefits of a modular ecosystem is all the diverse players it attracts. For this reason, it’s hard to see Solana overtake Ethereum,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kanade noted that Ethereum’s “longer track record and huge development community” meant that new developers were still likely to choose Ethereum and its ecosystem of layer 2s to build apps, saying that Solana still has a “way to go” before catching up.


Mark Smargon, founder and CEO of layer-1 blockchain Fuse Network, also said it is unlikely that Solana could ever surpass Ethereum.
“If we look at the long-term objective of Ethereum and the way the decentralized economy is built bottom-up, we can see that many ideas make their way to Solana after first being tested on Ethereum,” said Smargon.
“Ethereum is more of a ‘network of networks’ play, whereas Solana is more consumer-focused. Both are big plays, but they are not mutually exclusive. Some of the products and services on Solana can still originate or be powered by Ethereum,” he added.
Ultimately, Andersson said that viewing the two networks as direct competitors may not be the best approach.