The Consensus mechanism used in Ethereum 1.0 is Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism, the same as the mechanism that is used by Bitcoin’s Blockchain. The system requires a considerable amount of effort to mine a new block. the PoW consensus mechanism requires the network mining nodes to prove that their work is done. there are over millions of miners who participate in the process of consensus by “staking” their computing power/hardware to keep the network secure. while the mechanism ensures the network remains decentralized and barriers to entry to participating within the network are high, it also leads to reduced performance on the network as it cannot process many transactions per second.
Stateful nature -one of the main factors that differentiate Ethereum from Solana is its stateful nature. A stateful nature is when all transactions on the network are recorded into one state and if any new transactions occur, then the entire network of miners must update their copy of the network to reflect the new transactions.
This mechanism is not cheap, and this is why Ethereum 1.0 is considered to be slower compared to other ‘stateless’ blockchains like Solana.
Solana
The most important reason for Solana to be different from Ethereum is the underlying consensus mechanism. it is known as Proof-of-History (PoH) and, in essence, it requires a sequence of computational steps that determine the time passage between two events cryptographically. This is further done by adding timestamps to all transactions and tracking each one’s order.
State less nature -The key difference with Ethereum is that Solana has a ‘stateless’ architecture and, this helps reduce the overall memory consumption. Since the entire state of the network is cryptographically time-stamped and does not need updating for each transaction, they can be easily carried out sequentially. This is one of the factors that make Solana highly scalable.
This mechanism is cheap, and this is why Solan is considered to be the fastest among other blockchains.
Bridging Solana and Ethereum -
Neon Labs, a company building secure blockchain solutions, announced that it will be deploying its cross-chain EVM solution on the Solana testnet. The Neon EVM will grant any dApp in the Ethereum ecosystem access to high throughput and fast block time on Solana and lower gas prices without requiring code changes.
The Neon EVM creates a compatibility layer for Ethereum on the Solana blockchain, allowing anyone to run Ethereum contracts on Solana. It works by introducing incentivized Neon EVM operators to the Solana blockchain, facilitating transactions on behalf of Ethereum app users. These operators receive Ethereum-like transactions from apps that use Neon EVM. Then wrap them into Solana transactions, which are sent for execution on the Solana blockchain.
