Yang Mindao, founder of dForce, and 0x992, a senior figure in the field of memory blockchain, discussed the recently discussed topic of "SOL up and ETH down" in the community. Both of them believe that Solana's meme craze this year is similar to Ethereum's ICO craze in 2017, but their different views are that Yang believes that Ethereum's ICO is a large-scale infrastructure movement that gives the chain an advantage in infrastructure, while Solana's meme issuance lacks a moat.

Author: Yang Mindao, Founder of dForce

I will refer to this conversation as the emotional journey from ETH maxis to SOL maxis.

@0x992eth is one of the earliest DeFi practitioners in China, having been working on DeFi projects before 2019 and continuously investing in first and second tier projects. It is definitely a amphibious and multilateral warrior in the Ethereum trench. I share some observations about his transition from ETH to SOL maxis.

For example, SOL now resembles the grandeur of the 2017 Ethereum ICO era. SOL also experienced a huge turning point of revival (the collapse of FTX was SOL's DAO event), and truly established a self circulating self investment system. It is the third company after Bitcoin and Ethereum to establish a strong OG self investment ecosystem. Just like how ETH Maxis risked his life and incurred losses by investing heavily in various Ethereum ICOs with ETH, SOL OG is now doing the same thing.

Along the way, there have been countless Ethereum assassins, including ETC, EOS, Tron, and Polkadot (now the most reliable one seems to be Sun Ge's Tron). The closest in terms of potential energy may be EOS (the crowded ICO scene and lively super node competition), which really feels like ETH is about to perish (p.s: Multicoin was also one of the major players in EOS at that time).

Comparing ICO and Meme, at that time, besides Ethereum, there was no shortage of ICO chains. Every mainstream chain was promoting ICO, and everyone was playing this flywheel. But the real bottleneck is Ethereum. Looking at the release of memes now, most of the popular memes are also released on SOL.

But my observation is different from @ 0x992eth's here:

I think the ICO of Ethereum is a large-scale infrastructure movement of Ethereum, and the core DeFi infrastructure we use now is basically from the ICO era.

Ethereum is not inferior to its competitors in core metrics during each critical cycle (such as L2's gas and TPS), and SOL does not have an absolute competitive advantage in this regard (the newly launched SUI and APTOS have performance and usage that are not inferior to SOL).

Now SOL's meme trading is a highly commercialized track that will soon spill over to other chains. It cannot provide infrastructure financing for SOL (even pump fees do not flow back to SOL).

Where is Meme's moat? Why can't memes from other chains surpass SOL. I think highly commercialized meme distribution has no moat.

@0x992eth believes that the core advantages of SOL's meme are ecology (I summarize that SOL is already the Pearl River Delta of memes) and culture (just like different styles of rap that others cannot copy).

The Pearl River Delta may also be surpassed by Vietnam and India, but when it comes to culture, this is indeed a concern for me. After all, Bitcoin and Ethereum both started with this.

I have never worried about Ethereum's performance being inferior to other new startups, but if one day it becomes uncool, not geeky, and not transcendent, that is what truly worries people.

But I'm not so pessimistic, I don't think SOL will flip ETH, after all, Ethereum is still quite cool now.

If one day the community doesn't discuss Mars, longevity, privacy protection, and extreme decentralization, then it will truly perish.

Related articles: "Ethereum OG: Five Reasons Why Solana Cannot Become a Blockchain Backbone", "Solana Community Counters Ethereum OG Comment: Fanatical Nonsense", "ABCDE Investment Research Partner: Discussing Ethereum's Current 'Difficulties' from a Primary Market Perspective"