FTX
- FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried said solana was one of the few blockchains with a roadmap to scale million of transactions.
- Not a lot of other blockchains including ethereum are focused on scale he said at the Yahoo Finance conference Tuesday.
- Bitcoin sometimes comes under fire for not being able to accommodate many real-use cases.
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Sam Bankman-Fried, the 29-year old that heads up the FTX exchange, believes solana is better than ethereum as it's one of the few blockchains with a plan to accommodate mass adoption.
Bankman-Fried has a net worth of $22.5 billion thanks to his crypto business, which makes him the youngest person to enter the Forbes rich list after Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.
He spoke at Yahoo Finance and Decrypts's "Crypto Goes Mainstream" conference on Tuesday about how the biggest upside of the solana network is its ability to handle an enormous amount of users and transactions.
Solana is a decentralized finance (DeFi) peer-to-peer network that many have billed as an "ethereum killer", based on its quicker transaction speed and lower fees when compared to its larger rival.
The network can run 60,000 transactions per second at $0.0015 per transaction, while ethereum handles just 17,000 at a cost of $5.80 each.
"Solana is one of the few currently existing public blockchains that has a really plausible roadmap to scale millions of transactions per second at you know, fractions of a penny per transaction, which is a scale that you need for this," Bankman-Fried said.
"That is not where a lot of other blockchains have been focusing, including ethereum."
Solana launched in April 2020 and its token has risen by almost 16,000% so far this year. It's now the fifth biggest cryptocurrency by market value, with a capitalization of $73 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.
Ether, the native token of the ethereum network, launched in 2015 and so has had a bit of a head-start relative to other DeFi tokens. The network gives users the option to build applications over it such as non-fungible tokens, send payments and execute smart contracts, among others. It's risen by over 500% to record highs close to $5,000 this year, as users have flocked to the network.
Bankman-Fried said that a mass scale application business would need to be able to accommodate hundreds of millions to billions of users and transactions per second.
"That millions of transactions per second, is really a requirement of any mass scale system," Bankman-Fried said.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, is the most traded cryptocurrency and is gradually entering the financial mainstream. However, its network for now doesn't offer the same flexibility and scalability of say, ethereum. And transactions are a lot slower and more expensive, while its carbon footprint has been a source of concern for climate-conscious investors.