The debate between the Ethereum and Solana communities is not new, but it has always been the focus of the market for many years. Ethereum is the leading smart contract platform, with a rich ecosystem and accumulated value over time. Meanwhile, Solana, although born later, has gradually proven to be a formidable opponent to ETH, with the advantages of low fees, fast speed and a colorful memecoin ecosystem.

Recently, the Ethereum (ETH) vs. Solana (SOL) debate continued to emerge when analyst Flip Research wrote a long post on X, providing arguments showing that Solana is being "overrated", over-praised.

Below is a summary of the prominent views surrounding this debate.

Is Solana Overrated?

Flip Research exposes the four main metrics that SOL fans often use to compare with ETH, including:

• User base
• Fees
• DEX trading volume
• Stablecoin trading volume

Comparing the number of users between SOL and ETH

If you simply look at the parameters on the Token Terminal, you can see that the number of daily active users (DAU) of SOL is 1.3 million compared to 376,300 on ETH.

But looking deeper, for example on July 26, ETH had 1.1 million transactions with 376,300 active users. That is 2.92 transactions/user. While with SOL, 282.2 million transactions with 1.3 million users >> 217 transactions/user.

This can be explained because the Solana network has significantly lower transaction fees than the Ethereum mainnet, so users choose to use SOL more. Therefore, to be more objective, Flip Research continues to compare with L1 networks with low fees such as Arbitrum, Base, OP Mainnet, ...

The results show that Solana's number of transactions / user per day is superior to all.

DEX trading volume

The volume of DEX exchanges on Solana is extremely impressive. But the question is whether they are all real transactions, transactions at the right value or not, Flip Research checks the LP projects on the Raydium DEX exchange and comes to the conclusion:

- Many LPs have a 24-hour volume of up to tens of millions of USD but have extremely low liquidity >> These are all rug pull projects sooner or later.

- For example, the MBGA/SOL pair has 46,000 transactions, 10.8 million USD in volume, 2,845 wallets and generates 28,000 USD in fees on Raydium. But the above wallets are all related to each other, it seems that they are trading bots to create spam transactions >> increase the volume to impersonate a hot project >> attract users >> finally run away with the money.

- According to Flip Research, within 24 hours, on Raydium, there were more than 50 projects with over 2.5 million USD volume that were rug pulls. In total, they created 200 million USD in trading volume with 500,000 fees. Of course, these numbers are all included in the parameters for Solana's DEX, but it is impossible to filter out which are spam scams and which are real transactions.

- The DEX exchanges Orca and Meteora have fewer rug projects but cannot compare with the DEX exchange Uniswap on Ethereum. It is difficult to find rug projects with large volumes on Uniswap.

- Thus, it can be seen that the high DEX parameters of the Solana network mainly come from spam bot transactions, rug pull projects, wash trading, which means they are not real users.

The reason why Solana has many spam bot transactions is simply because the fees are cheap, the project is easy to deploy, while if the volume is high, it will earn a lot of fees. From there, it brings easy profits. While with ETH, the cost of deploying contracts and executing transactions is much higher, the amount of money scammed can sometimes not compensate for the cost.

Stablecoin

Recently, there is evidence that the ratio of volume to total stablecoin capitalization of Solana is higher than Ethereum. This shows that stablecoins on Solana are used more >> real users transact and operate on the Solana network more than competitors.

But that is only a small percentage. While the reality is that the stablecoin capitalization on Ethereum is far beyond Solana. Ethereum has a total stablecoin value of 80 billion USD, this number for Solana is only 3.2 billion USD.

Celebrity memecoin

In addition to the fact that projects on Solana are easier to rug pull than on Ethereum, another burning issue is celebrity memecoin.

As Coin68 reported, celebrity tokens either rug pull or dump to the "underground", and these tokens are all issued on Solana, through token issuance platforms that are too easy like pump.fun.

Or as Bubblemaps compiled a list of the 30 most popular celebrity coins, none of them recorded an increase in price. In addition, there is also the problem of insider trading.

Conclusion

With the above arguments, Flip Research finds that Solana is being over-hyped, analysts "paint" the data to have beautiful parameters, but in reality Solana does not really have such advantages.

In addition, Solana also:

- Poor stability, many times "freezing";

- High rate of unsuccessful transactions;

- High barriers for programmers, Rust language is difficult to use and less friendly than Solidity;

- Not easy to integrate with EVM chains.

Rebuttal arguments

Of course, the Solana supporters cannot sit still. Many analysts have refuted Flip Research's arguments as follows:

- Regarding the number of active users (DAU)

This is not a very effective parameter to measure the users of a network.

- About DEX trading volume

It is undeniable that Solana has many spam bot transactions, but that is a common problem of current blockchains, no chain is an exception. Bot transactions also have to pay fees as usual. Therefore, controlling spam bots is the task of all blockchains.

- About the current situation of memecoin rug pull

Solana did not become a good blockchain thanks to memecoin. Solana is loved because the network creates opportunities for everyone to participate in the field, experiment with new things, ape areas,... Memecoin is just one of them, and cannot represent the entire Solana ecosystem. In addition, the memecoin problem is also for all chains, not just one chain.