Insight: The current encryption industry is in need of engineering pragmatism like Solana.

Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211

At the darkest moment when Ethereum is facing revelations from departing employees and doubts about the Builder culture from the ecosystem, Lily Liu of the Solana Foundation is passionately preaching the grand vision of Solana at summit venues and university lectures.

What does this contrast highlight? SOL and ETH are experiencing a divide between engineering pragmatism and academic idealism:

1) The technological iteration speed of Solana has already “outperformed” Ethereum in practical terms. In the past year, the rapid updates of Alpenglow and Firedancer have addressed many practical experience issues such as the high proportion of junk transactions on Solana, the single risk of client software, and the instability of transaction fees.

In contrast, Ethereum has changed its leadership team, with core developers leaving, and the slow progress of ZK layer simplification, as well as the Pectra upgrade, ERC-8004, and a bunch of newly launched protocol standards still carrying a strong academic flavor.

2) Solana reduces the inefficiencies of decentralization using a business organization operation and maintenance approach. This includes feedback on Grant applications within 2-4 weeks, proactive technical support provided by official engineers, and endorsement or connection with top VC by high-quality project foundations, etc.

In contrast, the Ethereum Foundation has a lengthy application process for ESP, and the L2 ecosystem, with its “alignment” culture, operates independently, resulting in dispersed liquidity. As for the existing issues of interest transfer and cultural fragmentation, one can find clues in @peter_szilagyi's complaints. It is normal for a decentralized organization to have low collaborative efficiency, but decentralization has never been an excuse for internal decay and stagnation in evolution and progress.

3) The ICM on-chain Nasdaq plan proposed by Solana, as well as the narrative directions of US stock tokenization, DePIN, PayFi, etc., although lacking the MEME wealth effect in the short term, undoubtedly hits the key track for industry development in the next 3-5 years.

Clearly, for the overwhelming number of Crypto-native infrastructures, the biggest political correctness now is to embrace the adoption of Wall Street institutions and the integration with traditional TradFi finance. If one is still trapped in the current practical performance of stacked infra, such as standardization of layer 2 and liquidity interconnectivity issues, it cannot be said to be wrong. It can only be said that under the macro background of new ETF incremental funds pouring in, such a large investment yields little return, and the attractiveness will be very weak, which instead provides Wall Street with pure “utilitarianism” rhetoric.

Above.

After finishing this, I found that Solana's current performance seems to hide the shadow of Ethereum in the past, but why has it become powerful yet less down-to-earth? This article is also written with the mindset of FUD is Build. Criticism is not meant to deny, but rather to hope for change.

It's not to say that Solana will definitely succeed, nor that Ethereum will fail, but this engineering pragmatism is what I believe the current Crypto environment needs.