As the fingertips of ETH glided over the scratched operations table, the sound of light footsteps could always be heard behind him. This veteran craftsman, who has been in the field for ten years, wore two medals: ‘Pioneer of Decentralization’ and ‘Cornerstone of the Ecosystem’ on his chest. Every scratch on the operations table corresponds to a milestone—from the birth of Uniswap to the landing of PoS consensus, the network composed of tens of thousands of validators around the world acts like solid armor, allowing him to firmly hold the top position in the blockchain arena.
‘Are you testing the new Layer2 again?’ The voice of SOL was crisp and metallic, with the cuffs stained with the starlight of code. He had just completed the 3700th real-time transaction, and the PoH encryption clock at his fingertips was still slightly warm. This ‘watch’ forged from the hash chain is his core secret, able to anchor transaction order without node communication, saving a lot of turnaround compared to the off-chain Rollup relied on by ETH.
When ETH looked up, he saw SOL throwing a series of NFT minting tasks into the Sealevel parallel engine. Six smart contracts were running simultaneously in a multithreaded stream, taking less than 0.5 seconds in total, with transaction fees showing only 0.00025 dollars. "Just a speculative bubble." ETH frowned and called up his own TVL data, "My ecosystem has locked 60 billion dollars, and your Meme coin craze won't last long." His tone concealed the arrogance brought by his experience; after all, just the user base of Arbitrum and Optimism, two Layer2s, had made countless challengers retreat.
SOL has not refuted, but has only unfolded the ecological map of the palm. The DEX trading volume curve is steeply surpassing ETH's peak of 92 billion dollars, the icons of the 100,000 online players of (Star Atlas) are flickering in the corner, and the stablecoin testing data from JPMorgan is tightly adjacent to the node service identifiers of Amazon AWS. "I did indeed stumble in 2023." He gently touched the "network stability" module on the map, which records the entire history from frequent interruptions to the Firedancer client upgrade, "but now, my validator can support a throughput of millions, and there are a thousand more new developers than you."
Cheers from retail users can be heard outside. A group of young people who are new to cryptocurrency are surrounding SOL's operation table; they just completed a small transfer with a few cents, their faces filled with relief from high Gas fees. ETH silently watches this scene, recalling the tens of dollars transaction costs during its mainnet peak and the user complaints brought by Layer2 fragmentation, the joystick at his fingertips feels somewhat heavy.
SOL suddenly points to the distant technological horizon, where the Pectra upgrade blueprint is emitting a faint glow. "Sharding technology will push my TPS beyond 100,000, just like you switched from PoW to PoS back in the day; this is not disruption, it's evolution." His crypto clock and ETH's block header pulse simultaneously, creating a wonderful resonance, "You taught the industry what trust is, and I want to make trust run faster."
When the grayscale ETF application documents fell onto the operation table, ETH finally saw the ecological flywheel behind SOL — low fees attract users, users bring developers, developers give rise to applications, and applications then draw more institutions in. This machine driven by PoH, Turbine protocol, and Sealevel engine is spinning faster and faster.
As dusk falls, ETH polishes that "cornerstone of ecology" medal until it shines. He knows he will not disappear, just like the predecessors of the internet era never truly exited, but in the light and shadow ahead on the track, the footsteps of SOL are getting closer and closer. The throne of blockchain has never been eternal; when efficiency becomes the new faith, the seekers of light will eventually rewrite the rules.
