While many pundits have labeled Solana as an “Ethereum killer” due to its lower fees and faster transaction times, Solana Labs co-founder Raj Gokal said the project has no desire to kill the cryptocurrency — and wouldn’t be able to if it did.
Gokal made the comments in response to a Wednesday Twitter post from the co-founder of venture capital firm Placeholder, Chris Burniske, who wrote that “despite pretty words, L1 knives are fully out. In crypto, generally, people want their biggest bags to win.”
“This will influence almost all communications, so dont take what you see and hear as truth,” he added,
In response, Gokal emphasized that “it doesn’t have to be a fight” as he argued that the goal for all people working in the crypto space should be to onboard “every human” on to Web 3.0 and noted that:
“’Knives out’ implies we are trying to kill Ethereum. Ethereum cannot be killed, it’s impossible. And it’s already a beautiful force of good in the world, empowering millions and creating billions in wealth. Bitcoin is quite obviously the same.”
According to CoinGecko, Solana’s native cryptocurrency, SOL, is currently the fifth-ranked digital asset in terms of total market capitalization with $71.7 billion and is ahead of fellow “Ethereum killer” Cardano (ADA) at sixth with $67.4 billion. Ether (ETH) sits well ahead of the two in second place with a market cap of around $564.7 billion.
Solana has been making up a lot of ground lately, however. It’s up 11,742% over the past year to sit at $237.53, while ETH has gained 931% within that time frame to reach around $4,800.
I know you may not even be talking about @solana, and if so I apologize. but I’m just sad and disappointed that every time non-ethereum chains like solana see success or take big swings at growing, it’s seen as taking swings against incumbents.
— Raj Gokal (@rajgokal) November 10, 2021
we are trying to grow the movement
Solana’s expansion
Earlier this week, the Solana Foundation hosted the “Solana Breakpoint 2021” conference in Lisbon, Portugal featuring guests such as Gokal, Solana Labs CEO and co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire.
Speaking on day one of the event, Gokal stated that the Solana ecosystem has been “exploding” in 2021 across every vertical and “use case.” The co-founder highlighted data showing 2.2 million nonfungible tokens (NFT) were minted on the Solana blockchain within three months, along with more than $15 billion worth of total value locked in Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) as of Sunday ($14.47 billion at the time of writing).
Related: NYDFS-licensed Standard Custody brings Solana staking to institutions
In a Friday post titled “The Perpetual SOL Rise” from Messari researcher Dustin Teander, he noted that “Solana has received sizable investor attention over the last quarter” and pointed to a long list of promising “growth catalysts” for the project.
“In many respects, the price discovery has been healthily fueled across various sectors — a $100M gaming fund announced, Brave announcing native integration on the Web3 front, $100M investment from Reddit for Social Media, $40M raised by Neon Labs to bring EVM infrastructure over, pplpleasr launching NFTs on Solana, FTX building out an NFT integration.”
“And, of course, there’s Solana’s DeFi ecosystem that has seen a 4x TVL expansion since September,” he added.