Ethereum and Solana are like Android and iOS. Android values modularity: it runs on many different types of devices made by hundreds of manufacturers worldwide; Google only makes 1-2% of them. This approach made it the world’s most popular mobile operating system, with an estimated 60-75% market share. Android’s flexibility has been a boon for hardware companies making anything from smartphones to televisions, as they can bring new products to market without investing billions into building bespoke operating systems. However, such diversity also makes it more difficult to develop apps that seamlessly work across many devices with different specs, screen sizes, and the various versions of Android these devices run.
By contrast, because Apple makes all iOS devices, it can provide users and developers with a more integrated and consistent experience. The time saved by not having to optimize across different devices can go into delivering better apps that users are willing to pay a premium for, and it’s not uncommon for companies to launch on iOS first as a result. So, while Apple has just about a third of the market in terms of distribution, it does a much better job at capturing the value of its ecosystem with a whopping ~60% of all mobile spend, plus all the hardware revenue.
It’s not an original analogy, but it’s a useful one. Ethereum is similar to Android in that it’s quickly becoming more of a platform for third-party networks than the place where most end-users and developers operate. The fast-growing ecosystem of layer-2 (L2) networks using Ethereum mainnet for security or leveraging the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as an operating system already processes ~5-6x more transactions than Ethereum mainnet, and it’s easy to see how that number can quickly expand to 100x and beyond. These third-party networks are like the different Android OEMs: many offer directly competing services with slight variations, while others focus on specific markets or use cases. With a growing number of tools making it easier to launch L2s, we can easily imagine Ethereum’s “sphere of influence” growing to encompass hundreds of networks processing billions more transactions than Ethereum mainnet.
The EVM is poised to remain the most popular blockchain operating system, running on thousands of different networks and rollups across markets, sectors, and use cases. Ethereum will significantly benefit from this expanding ecosystem even as mainnet captures just a portion of its total value. However, this diversity brings many of the same challenges Google has with Android. For example, different EVM networks can run slightly different operating system versions, so Ethereum smart contracts aren’t guaranteed to run seamlessly on all of them by default, and developers have to spend extra time tweaking, testing, and maintaining for different environments. The Ethereum user experience can also become too fragmented for the average user: apps on one network may not be available on another, wallets don’t support all networks simultaneously, and switching or bridging across them can be confusing or even dangerous for the average user. These UX issues will get smoother over time, just as Android got smoother and safer as it developed. Still, the burden remains on developers to invest more time accounting for these issues than they would have otherwise.
On the other hand, Solana is similar to iOS in how it values tightly integrated components in the name of throughput and performance. There’s much more to it – different consensus mechanisms and design principles – but ultimately, Solana as a single, unified network is much faster and cheaper than Ethereum and many other EVM networks. Developers can focus on delivering better apps for a single, high-performance platform without worrying about transaction speed, gas cost optimization, or deploying across multiple networks, and users don’t have to worry as much about slow transactions, switching or bridging between networks, inconsistent wallet support, and other usability issues that plague Ethereum.
Of course, this is a surface-level analogy, and much detail is lost in the comparison. But it’s helpful to understand that it’s a game of nuanced choices, not winners and losers. Which is absolutely, objectively “better” doesn’t matter; that debate will never end. Some people will value a modular philosophy’s flexibility; others will value a more integrated platform’s speed and simplicity. What matters is that options exist, and you can choose what works best for you. The success of our industry requires a competitive set of platforms with different tradeoffs to maximize developer and user choice; today, Ethereum and Solana embody this spirit as two of the most promising smart contract networks in the market.
Understanding where we are in the financial and technology cycle is essential for investors. Bear markets are the best times to survey the market and pick new winners during a significant consolidation. Maxis would have you support only Ethereum, Bitcoin, or whatever network they favor and discard everything else, but that’s more emotion than logic. Indeed, there was a time when BTC was the only legitimate digital asset, and there was a time when Ethereum, like IBM at its peak, was the only real game in town despite emerging alternatives. But it's a mistake to assume that the status quo at any point in time will remain the same forever.