The Competition Between Ethereum and Solana: Supply-Side Reform and Consensus Mechanism Innovation

Ethereum is undergoing supply-side reform. After the dream of the infinite garden was shattered, Vitalik began to constrain the development of L2/Rollups and is more actively defending the L1 track. The "speeding up and reducing costs" plan for the Ethereum mainnet has been put on the agenda, and the shift to Risc-V is just the beginning. Next, how to catch up with or even surpass Solana in terms of efficiency will become a focus.

Meanwhile, Solana continues to expand its consumption demand scenarios. Solana insists on the path of strengthening L1, adhering to the concept of "either expand or die." In addition to the Firedancer developed by Jump Trading entering the deployment phase, the Alpenglow consensus protocol from the Anza team became the focus at the recent Solana conference in New York, attracting everyone's attention.

Interestingly, both Ethereum and Alpenglow share the ultimate dream of becoming the "world computer."

20% Security Consensus in the Era of Large-Scale Nodes

Traditionally, the number of nodes and their distribution are considered important indicators of the degree of decentralization of a blockchain network. To avoid centralization, a security threshold is usually set at 33%, meaning that no single entity should exceed this proportion.

Driven by capital efficiency, Bitcoin mining has ultimately evolved into a cluster of mining pools, while Ethereum has become the main stage for certain large staking platforms and exchanges. However, this does not mean that these entities can fully control the network operation. Under the model of "maintaining the network to earn incentives/management fees," they usually have no malicious motives.

However, when assessing the health of a network, its scale must be taken into account. For example, in a small group of only three people, a 2/3 majority is needed to be considered effectively operating. Pursuing only the minimum security guarantee of 1/3 is meaningless, as the remaining two can easily collude, resulting in very low costs for wrongdoing and very high rewards.

In contrast, in a large-scale network with 10,000 nodes, such as the current node scale of Ethereum, there is no need to pursue a 2/3 majority vote. Outside of the incentive model, most nodes do not know each other, and the coordination costs for collusion between large staking platforms are also too high.

Alpenglow has proposed an innovative idea: can we "speed up and reduce costs" by decreasing the number of nodes and the consensus ratio? They plan to maintain the scale of about 1500 nodes for Solana while reducing the security consensus to 20%. This not only can improve the confirmation speed of nodes, allowing them to earn more mainnet incentives, but also encourages the scale of nodes to expand to around 10,000.

Whether this approach will produce an effect of 1+1>2, or whether it will break through the existing security mechanisms, remains to be seen. However, this method seems very suitable for Solana to pursue a U.S. chain and centralized route, participating in public chain competition as a counterpart to Ethereum.

Alpenglow: Is it a modified Turbine or moving towards DPoS?

The theoretical basis of Alpenglow is that in the era of large-scale nodes, a strong consensus quantity is not required. Due to the PoS mechanism, malicious actors need to use enormous capital to control the network. Even at a scale of 20%, based on current prices, Ethereum requires $20 billion, while Solana requires $10 billion.

In practice, Alpenglow roughly divides the entire process into three parts: Rotor, Votor, and Repair. To some extent, Alpenglow is a deep transformation of the Turbine mechanism.

Turbine is Solana's block broadcasting mechanism, designed to disseminate block information for consensus confirmation among all nodes. Unlike the Gossip protocol used by early Ethereum, Turbine adopts an intermediate state approach. It classifies network nodes into hierarchical transmission, dividing them into Leader, Relay, and ordinary nodes within each cycle, where only Leader nodes can send block broadcast information.

In Alpenglow, the variant of the protocol is called Rotor, which essentially spreads block messages in an ordered manner, with no fixed Leader or Relay nodes. Votor is the node confirmation mechanism, for example, when the voting of nodes in the first round reaches a ratio of 80%, meeting the minimum of over 20%, it can be passed quickly. If the first round of voting is between 60% and 80%, a second round of voting is initiated, and final confirmation can be achieved by exceeding 60% again.

The innovation of Alpenglow lies in reducing the block consensus generation process, rather than simply increasing bandwidth. If it can limit data blocks to around 1500 Bytes and shorten the generation time to about 100ms (although it may be difficult to achieve this ideal state in practical large-scale applications), it would be a significant advancement.

Conclusion

After MegaETH, the existing L2 has basically developed to its limits. With SVM L2 unable to gain Solana support, there is a practical need for the Solana mainnet to continue scaling. Only with mainnet TPS overwhelming all competitors can the idea of Solana as an "Ethereum killer" be fully realized.

It is worth noting that Alpenglow is not limited to Solana; in theory, any PoS chain, including Ethereum, can use this mechanism. This indicates that existing blockchain research has reached the edge of technology and urgently requires more support from computer science and even sociological concepts.

In the development of blockchain, we have seen an evolution from complete decentralization to a certain degree of centralization. This evolution reflects the trade-off between efficiency and security. In the future, the direction of blockchain technology development may become more diversified to meet the balance of different scenarios and needs.