Solana Founder Ignores Blockchain's Dubious Record, Claims SOL Is 'Complimentary' To Ether

Solana blockchain's founder Anatoly Yakovenko has yet to introduce a permanent fix for the various issues that the network has been facing recently. However, he claims that the blockchain is "complementary" to the Ethereum Network despite the fact that the world's second-biggest blockchain network hasn't had a major breakdown in quite a few years.

In an interview with Decrypt published Tuesday, Yakovenko said that Solana developers only compare the blockchain to Ethereum "in terms of developer adoption" while adding that the two blockchains are in many ways "complementary" to each other.

"I think it's really important because they are the market leader," he said. "What's funny to me is that people call Solana an Ethereum killer, but we're so different."

Unlike Ethereum, the Solana blockchain has suffered many major outages since the beginning of 2022. The latter has been dealing with degraded performance and network instability recently. The last outage was witnessed on Sept. 30 which was caused by a misconfigured node (a computer running Solana software necessary for the network to run), according to Stakewiz, a Solana validator operator.

"There are use cases that you can't run on Ethereum that you can run on Solana, and this is where I start seeing devs really pick Solana over Ethereum," said the Solana blockchain founder.

However, contrary to these comments, the applications built on this blockchain have also witnessed exploits. Recently, Mango Markets, a popular decentralized exchange based on the Solana blockchain, was exploited for $116 million.

In another interview on Oct. 8 with Decrypt, Yakovenko stated that Firedancer, a second Solana client announced back in August, will be a "long-term fix" for the outages that the blockchain has been facing.

Yakovenko also pointed out that "at no point do failures like these put any users' funds or program state at risk, because Solana has 2,000 different validators."