Solana to outpace Ethereum in consumer applications: former head of growth

Solana could outpace Ethereum in terms of consumer DApps, according to the Solana Foundation’s former head of growth.

The Solana blockchain will overtake Ethereum in terms of consumer applications, Matty Taylor, the co-founder of Colosseum and former head of growth of the Solana Foundation, told Cointelegraph in an interview:

“Solana will continue, as shown over the last year, to outpace Ethereum in terms of getting consumer applications and end-user experiences to the level of Web3 in terms of utilizing the chain’s performance to create fast and user-friendly applications.”

There are currently 1,668 decentralized applications (DApps) on the Ethereum network, over three times more than the 477 on the Solana ecosystem, according to data from Alchemy.

Solana has often been touted as a so-called “Ethereum-killer” for having superior transaction throughput and faster transaction finality compared to Ethereum.

The downfall of FTX and the following bear market was a crucible moment for the Solana ecosystem, which received more and more developers despite the falling price of the Solana (SOL) token, according to Taylor:

“Over the last three to four months as we came out of the bear market, everyone realized that Solana as a network had gone through an important crucible moment that most L1 ecosystems had gone through, [like] Mount Gox with Bitcoin…The 2020 bear market was that crucible moment, but Solana came out much stronger than ever and there’s more developers building.”

Ethereum’s total value locked (TVL) currently stands at $49.7 billion, which is over 10 times bigger than Solana’s $4.01 billion TVL, according to DefiLlama data.

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The Solana blockchain experienced a significant outage on Feb. 6, as block production ground to a halt for over five hours before validators restarted the network. Solana has seen around half a dozen significant outages since January 2022.

While network outages are a negative sign for any ecosystem, blockchains pushing the limits of scalability will inevitably run into similar issues. Taylor told Cointelegraph:

“I’m glad that’s happening now, rather than when the world’s pension funds are on blockchain. It’s unfortunate but these [innovations] will have growing pains.”

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