Avalanche vs Solana blockchain comparison (Part One)

• Avalanche and Solana blockchain features
• Features of Avalanche
• Features of Solana
• The consensus mechanism of the two platforms
• Avalanche's consensus mechanism
• Solana's consensus mechanism
• Decentralization of two platforms
• Conclude

Avalanche and Solana are blockchains with extremely developed ecosystems. In addition, both networks are continuously developing applications in areas such as DeFi, NFT, GameFi and DAO. 

However, within the framework of this article we will not make comparisons on economic grounds. Because Avalanche and Solana have their own unique features in their economies and offer different features.

Instead, in season one, we'll look at both the strengths and weaknesses of Avalanche and Solana . These are two of the blockchains that receive a lot of attention from investors in the Crypto market.

Avalanche is a blockchain using Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism , which is secure and scalable with high performance. This is where users can make bulk transactions without polluting the environment, with transaction processing times of less than two seconds and extremely low costs.

According to a January 2022 report, Avalanche has 17,700 developers and that number will continue to grow in the future. 

Avalanche is not only backed by the community, but also backed by the experienced Ava Labs team. They are leaders at companies like Microsoft, Google, Morgan Stanley, AT&T, NASA and several other large companies.

The next candidate in this comparison is Solana (SOL). The platform was founded in 2017 by computer scientist Anatoly Yakovenko and is backed by Solana Labs – a software company based in the US and run by the Solana Foundation based in Switzerland.

Solana is also a decentralized blockchain where developers can build dapps. Similar to Avalanche, Solana is extensible and user- and developer-friendly.

Solana uses PoH (Proof of History) consensus mechanism, based on PoS (Proof of Stake) to be able to process thousands of transactions per second. With Solana's block time of 400 milliseconds, Solana can process between 45,000 and 65,000 transactions per second. 

This is the same speed as VISA's payment network and this makes Solana the fastest blockchain platform in the cryptocurrency market.

However, in fact, for Solana to achieve the transaction processing speed mentioned above, it requires many new improvements for the platform to develop further.

That's why Solana continues to grow its ecosystem with a variety of Dapps, DeFi protocols, NFTs, DAOs and more.

The team behind Solana is called Solana Labs, they will support the platform in technical aspects related to blockchain technology.

Avalanche and Solana blockchain features

In this section, we will learn about the features of each project and the first will be Avalanche.

Features of Avalanche

At Avalanche, developers have more flexibility to code in private and public smart contracts. At the same time, they can also develop Dapps combined with existing tokens and NFTs in the Avalanche ecosystem. 

Thanks to its very high scalability, all users in Avalanche's ecosystem can simultaneously use any Dapp, but still ensure the performance of that Dapp.

For each subnet, Avalanche can handle about 4,500 transactions per second. Thus, people can perform a large number of transactions on this network, but still not experience congestion. 

Additionally, Avalanche's team and community pride themselves on the security and decentralization of the network. Because Avalanche is a blockchain with 1,200 validators with an annual return of 9.8%. Therefore, it has a high level of security and is proven when it is resistant to 51% attack.

In addition, anyone holding AVAX has the right to participate in Avalanche's governance system, to pass governance proposals, as well as make proposals to help this network grow further. However, unlike other blockchains, Avalanche limits its right to change the system.

Another core feature is interoperability, Avalanche has the ability to connect with other blockchains, with the goal of supporting the execution of smart contracts.

For example , deBridge Finance is a cross-chain protocol that has developed Avalanche bridges with Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain , Arbitrum , and Polygon.

Another important bridging protocol compatible with Avalanche is WanChain. It supports Avalanche connecting with other blockchains such as Bitcoin, Polkadot, Moonriver , Ripple, Dogecoin, Fantom and EOS.

Features of Solana 

One of Solana's coolest features is that it allows any project to fully integrate within its solid Layer 1 platform. This means that Dapps will be more secure and stable over time.

Another important thing to consider of Solana is that it is censorship resistant. That is, Solana is made to resist external measures that can affect it. 

In other words, Solana's architecture aims to satisfy the three very important properties of a perfect blockchain: scalability, high security, and decentralization.

Solana's nodes are called Clusters - a group of independent computers. It basically works to keep a record of events to create a decentralized ledger and no one has the right to delete the data in it.

Both projects have outstanding features and their own strengths. But overall, Avalanche has the upper hand in this comparison. Because in fact, Solana has some security related issues and there have been some very serious hacks, such as the hack of the Wormhole bridge. This has disappointed many Solana investors and reduced investor confidence in the network.

The consensus mechanism of the two platforms

Avalanche's consensus mechanism

As we mentioned, Avalanche uses a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. And the platform enjoys scalability, a high level of security, and decentralization. Besides, each Avalanche subnet can handle 4,500 transactions per second and saves energy as it does not need special hardware.

Solana's consensus mechanism

On the other hand, Solana has some pretty innovative key features using the new consensus mechanism, PoH. With this mechanism, nodes can verify the time and order of transactions to prioritize processing them in a certain order.

This consensus mechanism is a variation of Proof of Stake, but it uses a cryptographically secure function that records every feature of transactions over time.

With the advantage of using the new consensus mechanism Proof of History, Solana is definitely different from a lot of other blockchains including Avalanche. So Solana gets the edge over Avalanche in this part.

Decentralization of two platforms

The only indicator that proves blockchain is truly decentralized is the Nakamoto coefficient. In the case of Avalanche, the Nakamoto coefficient is 26, and the network has about 1,200 validators.

In Solana's case, the network has 1,249 validators and Nakamoto's coefficient is 19. However, both of these platforms are far behind Ethereum 2.0 with 342,000 validators.

The reason for this disparity stems from transaction costs. If an investor wants to become one of the validators on Ethereum 2.0, it will cost a lot. 

On the other hand, building a node in Avalanche currently costs 200 AVAX or about $15,000 and doesn't require much hardware. While Solana, it only costs you a maximum of about 10,000 USD, but must meet specialized hardware requirements. 

Therefore, for the comparison of decentralization, Avalanche will prevail over Solana because the cost of creating a reasonable node does not require much hardware. Add to that the high Nakamoto coefficient and the number of validators of the platform is close to that of Solana.

Conclude

The above is the first part of the Avalanche vs Solana blockchain comparison article. The TraderH4 team hopes that through the above article, readers can better understand the 3 core aspects that make up the brand of Avalanche and Solana, which are outstanding features, consensus mechanism and decentralization. At the same time, readers have a more intuitive view of the advantages of Avalanche and Solana when putting them on the same scale. 

In the next section, we will continue to compare Avalanche and Solana through their ecosystems. Join the TraderH4 team for part two on the TraderH4.com website .

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