Solana Founder Says The Network Will Die If It Stops Evolving Amid Rising Ecosystem Competition ⋆ ZyCrypto

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has warned that the network will face extinction if it stops making improvements. Yakovenko’s comments came on the heels of Vitalik Buterin’s push to “ossify” Ethereum, potentially slowing an avalanche of network changes.

Solana’s Founder Disagrees With Buterin, Pushes For Steady Improvements

Yakovenko, in an X post, revealed that Solana’s long-term future depends on steady improvements to the blockchain to better serve users and developers.

He argued that the network should put users’ needs at the top of the pyramid to ensure its survival. Yakovenko stated that if Solana is “materially useful,” developers will spare LLM token credits to upstream improvements to the blockchain.

“To not die requires to always be useful,” wrote Yakovenko. “So the primary goal of protocol changes should be to solve a dev or user problem.”

While solving users’ needs is a priority, Yakovenko disclosed that providing a solution to every problem is not feasible in the real world. He pushed for a balance, clarifying that “saying no to most problems is necessary” for efficient network operations.

Going forward, the Solana co-founder added that the protocol changes should not be left to a particular group or individuals, urging new players to push for network upgrades. At the moment, a significant number of Solana’s improvements are powered by Anza, Firedancer, the Solana Foundation, and the validators’ community.

“You should always count on there being a next version of Solana, just not necessarily from anza, labs or fd,” Yakovenko said. “The way things are going we are likely to end up in a world where a simd vote pays for the GPUs that write the code.”

Ethereum Founder Eyes Ossifying The Network

Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin is pulling strings to reduce the spate of Ethereum’s network changes. Per Vitalik, Ethereum will undergo an improvement spree in the coming years to add key upgrades, reducing dependency on features that are not already in the protocol.

“Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum’s technological and social robustness for the long term,” said Buterin.

In the coming year, Buterin wants Ethereum to prioritize upgrades to ensure full quantum resistance, an architecture to support scalability, and a state architecture designed to last for decades. Furthermore, Buterin is backing changes to ensure decentralization and a gas schedule that is impervious to DoS vulnerabilities.