Solana (SOL) Cannot Serve as the Backbone of the New Global Financial System, According to Ethereum (ETH) Community Member Ryan Berckmans

Solana (SOL) shifted from its initial “monolithic” approach to acknowledging the importance of Layer 2 solutions. But Berckmans points out

Ethereum community member Ryan Berckmans has stated that Solana cannot serve as the backbone of the so-called “new” global financial system.

Solana (SOL) has gradually shifted from its initial monolithic approach to acknowledging the importance of Layer 2 (L2) solutions. However, Berckmans points out on Twitter that Solana initially marketed itself as capable of handling global transaction loads on a single chain. This was before they quietly rebranded their L2 solutions as “Network Extensions” instead of acknowledging them as L2s.

Solana's gradual acknowledgment of Ethereum's (ETH) L2 backbone strategy came after seeing flagship applications building custom L2 appchains on their network. This shift in perspective became more pronounced when a major Solana development team pivoted to building a SVM L2 on Ethereum.

There'll be one global backbone – Ethereum

Ethereum is the backbone of the new global financial system of L2s and L1 apps. No other chain will come close.

Mert suggested that Sol can pivot to being the backbone. But Solana will never be the backbone. Here's 5 reasons why.

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Several barriers stand in front of Solana

Having spent eight months as a senior engineer on the Augur Project, a prediction platform on the Ethereum blockchain, Berckmans went on to identify several key barriers that stand in the way of Solana becoming a global backbone.

Firstly, he stated that Solana operates with only one production client (agave rust), while a global backbone would require at least three fully independent chain clients with balanced stake distribution. According to Berckmans, the development of their second client, Firedancer, is facing major delays due to the lack of a proper protocol specification and research community.

Solana's high bandwidth requirements (recommending 10Gbps upload) create major centralization risks and practical limitations. This requirement clashes with the notion of a global backbone that should be able to operate anywhere.

The platform’s history of frequent outages and lack of protocol-level fallback capabilities also pose additional risks, he stated. Unlike Ethereum, Berckmans noted that Solana lacks the ability to continue producing blocks when finalization issues occur.

Finally, Berckmans pointed out that economic centralization presents another major concern when it comes to Solana. With an estimated 98% insider allocation from their initial coin offering (ICO) — compared to Ethereum's 80% public sale — questions arise about the true decentralization of the platform.

The emergence of zk proof aggregation for L2 settlement poses further challenges to Solana's position. While Solana focuses on L1 execution scaling, this approach conflicts with the requirements for a global transaction backbone, which instead favors L2 settlement, according to Berckmans.

Looking ahead, he predicts that Solana’s year-over-year market share will continue to decline in comparison to Ethereum's combined L1 and L2 ecosystem. As evidence of the market's direction, Berckmans cites major corporations such as Coinbase, Kraken, Sony, and Visa choosing Ethereum L2 solutions.

The analysis concludes that while Solana has shown strength in areas like meme coin growth and price appreciation, its fundamental limitations ultimately prevent it from serving as the backbone of a global financial system.