Solana bets on developers adapting to Rust as it prepares to take on Ethereum
Solana, a fast-growing blockchain which has been in the news as the next Ethereum, continues to bet that the developers would be able to adapt to the fact that they would need to use Rust for developing on Solana.
Most of the Defi developers so far have been used to developing using Solidity which is the language of choice for Ethereum but Solana has been able to attract the developer community to develop on its blockchain. Its co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, said that there has been active developer community engagement both within and outside the Solana ecosystem which has helped it to flourish.
He also pointed out the fact that in the general developer community, the number of developers using Rust far exceeds those who use Solidity for their development purposes. So the transition of such developers into the DeFi ecosystem shouldn’t be a challenge in the long term and he expects the ecosystem to take off in the coming years.
The blockchain is capable of handling more than 50,000 transactions per second and hence network congestion would not be a problem. In recent times, the market cap of Solana has grown to over $9 billion and it continues to raise funds from active investors who believe that it could be the challenger that will give Ethereum a run for its money.
Solana Labs is trying to build a totally different and independent ecosystem than what exists right now and the DeFi ecosystem is highly skewed towards Ethereum. This is likely to be a big challenge as the developers who are there in blockchain and those who come in afresh would be more used to the tools that are already in existence. So making this community begin developing smart contracts on a different platform with a different language and tools could be an uphill task but Anatoly believes that it’s only a matter of time before that changes.
Projects like Polygon and Binance Smart Chain have offered EVM compatibility to the developers which have helped them to attract large projects and also enhance their market value to a great extent. For Solana, a tool for conversion of Rust to Solidity is in the works and this will help smart contracts that are written in Solidity to be used on Solana as well.
Solana has a very big uphill battle to get ready to take on Ethereum which has a huge developer community and also has a lot of value locked within it due to all these platforms and applications that have been developed on it over the years. Solana has to play a lot of catch-up to do if it has to challenge it and that would need a lot more users, developers, and liquidity pools to be onboarded in the coming months.
