Overview

The Ethereum merge will reduce Ethereum’s enormous carbon footprint, by switching the validation system from PoW to PoS. However, this significant change will not solve the scalability and high transaction fee problem of the Ethereum blockchain. This implies that the alternative solutions will remain relevant to the blockchain world.

One of the well-known competitors of Ethereum is Solana has gotten remarkable attention since a year ago by remarkable performance and huge NFT market. However, still is a question whether Solana can continue outperforming Ethereum or not.

The expansion of the ecosystem is considered an important indicator of the growth and popularity of a blockchain.

This dashboard focuses on the development of these two blockchains and provides comparative insight into the number of smart contracts usage and popularity in Solana and Ethereum. \n

Graphs below show the popular smart contracts their sectors and types.

We can see that while wETH token contract is most popular on Ethereum, Serum which is a dex contract is the most popular contract among Solana,s.

Tables below list the top 50 contracts on Ethereum and Solana in terms if number of usage.

Conclusion

The data shows that Ethereum hosted substantially more development than the Solana blockchain. However, the development on Solana is expanding and growing.

The question remaining unanswered is what contributes into the expansion of blockchains. Two usual suspects would be 1) the price of native token which attracts many to trade and hold which encourages many to provide smart contracts on the very blockchain, and 2) performance.

Graphs below compares price and the number of transactions (as the proxy of performance and popularity) on Ethereum with Solana.

Scatter plots below shows while there is a correlation between the popularity of a blockchain and the development on the very blockchain, there is no correlation between price and the development.

We can conclude that as Solana attracts more people, more developers attracted to build contracts on Solana.

Number of active contracts

Active contract is defined here as smart contracts that is used by users.

Graphs below show the daily number of active contracts over time. We can see that while the number of active contract addresses on Solana is steadily growing in 2022, on Ethereum fluctuating.

The graphs show that the number of active smart contracts on Ethereum is far higher than the number of active contract addresses on Solana.