Solana the Monolith

More Than Just Scaling With Hardware

About a year ago, I wrote a piece on Cosmos and the appchain thesis. In that report, I had a slide with a high-level overview of how blockchain ecosystems intend to scale: Ethereum with execution rollups (either zk or optimistic), Celestia with their sovereign rollups, Cosmos with appchains, and Solana with hardware. Looking back on this, I feel this slide does not paint the complete picture for Solana and puts it in a somewhat unfair light. Solana is not just about slapping some expensive hardware on a blockchain and calling it a day, but rather, how do we optimize software to best take advantage of performant hardware?