The Bank of America (BoA) believes that Solana blockchain will emerge as the world’s “visa of digital asset ecosystem”. Since its launch in 2020, Solana has settled over 50 billion transactions. This includes more than $11 billion in total value locked and in excess of 5.7 million non-fungible tokens (NFTs) minted. And in comparison, Visa has processed 164.7 billion transactions in the year ending September 30, 2021.
Alkesh Shah, a digital asset strategist at BoA, applauded Solana for its high throughput, low cost, and ease of use. He said it creates a blockchain optimized for consumer use cases like micro-payments, NFTs, DeFi and decentralized networks like Web3 and gaming.
Shah noted that Solana with its low fees, ease of use and scalability, is taking a slice of Ethereum’s market share. He said Ethereum may fall back because of high transaction fees, storage and supply chain use cases, as well as identity. Moreover, the Ethereum blockchain is undergoing a major upgrade that will take years to complete. As such, Solana will definitely ride on the high wave.
The BoA strategist highlighted that Visa processes 1,700 transactions per second (TPS), on average, but it can handle at least 24,000 TPS. Ethereum executes about 12 TPS on mainnet, while Solana has a theoretical limit of 65,000 TPS. Shah pointed out that Solana emphasizes scalability.
But he noted that a less decentralized and secure blockchain has setbacks. Solana blockchain has had several network performance issues since its inception. It experienced withdrawal problems and a DDos attack. Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs, on December 22 had said they are working to fix the network’s problems. He argued that Solana’s runtime is a new design and it needed lots of innovation for the betterment of users.
