Avalanche VS Solana

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What is Avalanche

Avalanche is a layer 1 blockchain which stands out for its transaction speeds and reliability. Avalanche is powered by its native token AVAX which can be used to pay for transaction fees, to be staked and sent as a currency. Avalanche is often touted as an “Ethereum killer” however has turned into a powerhouse of a layer 1 itself. Known for its DeFi protocols due to its near instant transaction speeds and low transaction fees.

Avalanche boasts transaction fees as low as 0.001 AVAX and transaction speeds of 4,500 transactions per second. The native token AVAX is used to pay for transactions and when paid the transaction fee is burned.

With a market cap of 5 billion Avalanche is the 17th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap.

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Reliability

Avalanche is known for it’s reliability and network up time. It is why it has become such a popular network for DeFi. That is why as of today it has a whopping $2.4 billion total value locked, making Avalanche the 4th biggest cryptocurrency by TVL (total value locked). This puts Avalanche ahead of larger networks such as Solana and Polygon.

In the past 90 days Avalanche has had 100% uptime and 0% downtime since August of 2021. Being able to provide such a high rate of uptime reassures investors especially those looking to delve into DeFi.

Scalability

Scalability is what Avalanche is most known for. Avalanche uses subnets which can be thought of as layer 2 on Ethereum or a parachain on Polkadot in a sense to ensure the scalability of the network. Users can create dApps, protocols and launch their own chains through these subnets.

Most chains/networks will run a single chain that all dApps and protocols on the network runs through, Avalanche on the other hand runs multiple chains parallel called subsets allowing Avalanche to scale much higher than other blockchains.

To read more on Avalanche scalability I would recommend reading this article.

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Wallets

Avalanche offers its own built wallet which boasts itself as being simple, secure and non-custodial.

However, possibly the most popular wallet to store your AVAX in is Metamask. To add AVAX to your Metamask simply add the following network information:

Network Name: Avalanche Network

New RPC URL: https://api.avax.network/ext/bc/C/rpc

Chain ID: 43114 or 0xa86a

Currency Symbol: AVAX

Block Explorer URL: https://snowtrace.io/

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What is Solana

Solana is a layer 1 network focusing on low gas fees and scalability. It currently boasts transaction speeds of 50,000 transactions per second. To put this into perspective Ethereum manages about 15 transactions per second. To top this off Solanas fees are also very minimal, charging just $0.0001 per transaction, again let’s place this up against Ethereum which often charges anywhere from $10 right up to $100 per transaction.

Solana uses proof of stake (POS) as their consensus mechanism which allows miners to use existing coins to validate transactions and mints new ones. This is a much better system to use compared to what Ethereum uses which is proof of work (POW). This allows Solana to be much more scalable than Ethereum.

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Transaction speeds

One of Solanas big selling points is the fast transaction speeds, combined with the clean user friendly user interface this makes for a very clean and easy to use network especially for beginners.

With the network continuously holding transaction speeds of 2,000 transactions per second and plans to scale this right up to a theoretical 700,000 transactions per second Solana is possibly the fastest network available right now.

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Transaction fees

No one wants to pay high fees when sending payments. For the mass adoption of Crypto it is going to be crucial that transactions can be sent at a low cost, this is where Solana thrives boasting a cost pre transaction of just $0.00025 per transaction.

This makes for a very cheap network to use and it is possibly the cheapest to do so. Mix these low transaction fees with the fast transaction speeds and you have a network completing millions of transactions per day.

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Reliability

Solana has experienced some issues with reliability over the past couple months with the network coming down a small handful of times. This is due to a couple of different reasons, one is botting. Due to the low fees Solana is a perfect environment for bots to run wild especially in the NFT sector. The developers at Solana have since made changes and placed some ant botting measures in place which has slightly helped with this problem.

Solana is still technically in beta and the team is actively pushing out a lot of updates which is a great sign. For a beta network to be handling 240 million transactions per day while still in beta is impressive.

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Wallets

Solana offers a handful of native wallets all with clean user interfaces that all seem to be targeting the simplicity side of the network. You don’t need to worry about changing technical settings or dealing with any “blockchain” tech.

Some of the most popular Solana wallets are: Phantom, Sollet & Solflar.

Solana is not compatible with the wallet giant Metamask.

Even during the bear market Solana is experiencing a rapidly growing wallet user base, this tells us that even during turmoil in the markets users are still using Solana not just as an investment but also as a network. This is rare in crypto and definitely not something we want to ignore.

The most popular wallet for Solana is Phantom, a browser extension and also mobile wallet with a very clean UI and smooth operating experience. From this data from Tech Dreams we can see that between January 1st 2022 and January 30th 2022 there were 6.89 million unique Solana wallets.

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Conclusion

As we can see both Solana and Avalanche have their pros and cons and certain areas where they excel. For Solana they completely dominate the NFT space while Avalanche has a good control over the DeFi space.

The future is very much going to be multichain so why not get involved in both Solana and Avalanche. As always, do your own research.

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