The debate between Ethereum and Solana as L1 rivals ignores how radical their architectures will be in 2025. Ethereum has evolved into a settlement layer for modular rollups, while Solana has doubled down on monolithic throughput.
Ethereum abandoned the monolithic chain race years ago because its roadmap treats the base layer as colonization infrastructure. At the same time, execution takes place on Layer 2 (L2) rollups that publish state roots to the mainnet.
Solana made the opposite bet, with a unified ledger, sub-second time slots, and a proof-of-history pipeline that sequences transactions into a single global ledger.
Both paths provide transactions that appear instantaneous to users who click “send,” but the security models diverge sharply once you wonder what happens in the seconds, minutes, or days after that click.
The question manufacturers will face in 2026 is not which chain operates faster in a vacuum; which is more effective in practical application. It’s about which model provides the least friction for the application they want to build and how much they are willing to pay, in terms of latency, complexity or time to release, for the assurances each system provides.
Monolithic speed versus modular purpose
Solana’s architecture consolidates inclusion, confirmation, and economic finality into a single 400-millisecond window when the network is functioning properly.
Validators vote on blocks using a proof-of-history clock that timestamps transactions before consensus, allowing the network to route throughput without waiting for traditional BFT round trips.
Users see confirmation feeds after two-thirds of votes are cast on the block, usually within half a second, and full finality arrives about 12 seconds later.
Jakob Povšič, co-founder of Temporal, described the result for users in a note:
“For most end users, a transaction is considered “confirmed” once two-thirds of the network has voted on its block, which takes less than half a second.”
Ethereum’s modular design separates these stages. Rollups sequence off-chain transactions: Arbitrum produces blocks every 250 milliseconds, while Optimism produces blocks every two seconds. As a result, users see a “soft” finality at the moment the sequencer accepts the transaction.
But the economic finality only arrives when the accumulation displays its state root on L1 and the window of dispute or validity closes.
Optimistic rollups impose seven-day testing periods before users can opt out of the mainnet, while ZK rollups compress that period to 15 minutes or a few hours by submitting proofs of validity.
Will Papper, co-founder of Syndicate, argued that the delay was less significant than it seems. In a note, he added:
“Many instant bridges feel comfortable operating on non-finalized rollup states anyway. L2s offer sub-second inclusion for applications that rarely bridge to L1, but applications requiring frequent mainnet settlement pay a time cost that Solana avoids.”
What users really feel
The architectural difference reshapes how each system handles congestion, charges, and outages. On Solana, the base fee remains set at 5,000 lamports per signature, or approximately $0.0001, while priority fees allow users to bid for inclusion during traffic peaks.
Stakes-weighted QoS routes high-priority transactions from known validators faster, and local fee markets prevent single hot accounts from clogging the scheduler.
Most retail transactions are less than a cent. When the system fails, it fails globally: Solana’s February 6, 2024 outage lasted four hours and 46 minutes after a legacy loader bug forced validators to restart the cluster.
L2 fees fluctuate based on the Ethereum blob market. Nonetheless, the introduction of the Dencun blob in March 2024 and the increase in Pectra capacity in May 2025 have pushed typical “send” transactions to single-digit cents on major rollups.
Failure modes differ: an offline L2 sequencer pauses user activity on this rollup even when Ethereum L1 is operating normally.
The 45-minute outage of the base in September 2023 and the several-hour disruptions of Optimism and Starknet in 2024-2025 illustrate localized risk.
Failure proofs and forced inclusion mechanisms provide escape hatches, but the UX during an outage depends on whether or not the affected rollup implements these backstops.
Challenge windows and the reality of withdrawal
The seven-day optimistic withdrawal window exists because evidence of fraud requires time for validators to submit challenges if execution was improper.
OP Mainnet, Base and Arbitrum all apply the time limit. Papper suggested that the delay has become invisible, saying that “ideally these internals are invisible from a UX perspective.”
Third-party bridges mitigate the delay by lending liquidity, allowing users to benefit from near-instant exits for a small fee. ZK rollups eliminate the dispute period by submitting proof of validity, allowing withdrawals in minutes or hours.
Solana does not have a withdrawal window because transactions settle directly on L1. Unified State means there is no side chain to exit from, so “finality” and “withdrawal” collapse into the same 12 second threshold.
This simplicity removes a transition layer of trust but concentrates all the risk of failure in the validator client and network stack.
MEV mining on Solana runs through Jito’s block engine, which validators integrate into the auction bundle space.
Stakes-weighted quality of service (QoS) provides preferential treatment to high-stakes validators, improving predictability for researchers but raising fairness questions for small participants.
Ethereum’s trajectory aims to strengthen inclusion guarantees at the protocol level. The 2026 “Glamsterdam” upgrade plans to enshrine the proponent-builder separation and introduce inclusion lists that require proponents to include specified transactions in one or two slots.
Papper argued that guarantees of inclusion matter more than the purpose of a single niche:
“The second most beneficial element is inclusion guarantees, as they allow applications to be more confident about the inclusion of transactions, thus providing a better UX.”
Firedancer versus modular maturity
The catalyst for Solana is Firedancer, the independent validator client developed by Jump Crypto. Public demos showed much higher throughput than the current Agave client.
Povšič emphasized that culture change is “what is fundamentally different today from the breakdown risks of the past, is the culture of development.” He added that the core teams took an approach focused on safety and reliability.
Deploying Firedancer introduces client diversity, reducing single implementation risk and pushing latency and throughput caps higher. The Alpenglow execution time aims for less than 150 milliseconds.
Ethereum’s roadmap brings together three near-term upgrades. Pectra, delivered in May 2025, has increased blob throughput. Fusaka, due this quarter, is shipping PeerDAS: a peer-based data availability sampling system that allows nodes to verify data without downloading full blobs.
Glamsterdam in 2026 will bring PBS and time-honored inclusion lists, strengthening resistance to censorship. The OP Stack and Arbitrum chains are fault-proof systems that allow permissionless validation.
Papper predicted that lower-cost data availability (DA) generates the most immediate gains:
“Cheaper availability of data leads to lower fees. This ensures that each transaction on a rollup becomes cheaper.”
Who should build where
High frequency trading and market making require the shortest possible lead time. Solana’s single-slot path, stake-weighted QoS, and Jito bundles deliver this when milliseconds count.
Povšič says the infrastructure is mature:
“We’ve come a long way… from an NFT mint that almost brought down the chain in late 2021 to Solana surviving the recent Black Friday without breaking a sweat.”
Chained games and social apps that rarely install on L1 are a good fit for L2. Arbitrum’s 250-millisecond blocks feel instantaneous, and post-Dencun fees rival Solana’s sub-cent savings.
Builders inherit Ethereum’s settlement layer when needed. Papper noted that preconfirmations reduce latency even further:
“I think 200ms after the preconfirmations are already imperceptible for most users.”
Payments and mainstream DeFi depend on fees and output flows. If users rarely make the bridge to L1, L2 UX competes directly with Solana. If the application requires frequent mainnet settlement or atomic composability across many accounts, Solana’s unified ledger simplifies the architecture.
Povšič highlighted the developer advantage:
“Beyond cost and performance, the biggest benefit of Solana for developers is the simplicity of global shared state. You don’t have to worry about bridging or the added complexity of data availability.”
The competitive question in 2026 is not whether Solana or Ethereum is faster or cheaper in isolation. The question is to know which model best corresponds to the latency, cost and purpose requirements of the application that a manufacturer wishes to deliver.
Solana is betting that packing execution, settlement, and finality into a single 400-millisecond slot creates the path of least friction, and Firedancer pushes that envelope further.
Meanwhile, Ethereum is betting that separation of concerns, L1 for settlement, L2 for execution, allows each layer to specialize and scale independently, with cheaper blobs and mature failure proofs narrowing the UX gap.
Users care about the composite metric: UX confirmation time times cost times reliability. Both ecosystems have optimized different parts of this curve in 2025, and the 2026 upgrades will test whether monolithic throughput or modular scaling provides the best product at scale.
The answer will depend on the application.
This is not a hedge, but rather an acknowledgment that the two models made different architectural tradeoffs, and that these tradeoffs produce noticeably different results for different workloads.
