The debate pitting Ethereum against Solana as rival L1s ignores how radically diverged their architectures were in 2025. Ethereum evolved into a settlement layer for modular rollups, while Solana doubled monolithic throughput.
Ethereum left the monolithic chain race years ago, as its roadmap treats the base layer as settlement infrastructure. At the same time, execution occurs on layer-2 (L2) rollups that send state roots back to the main net.
Solana did the opposite, with a single unified ledger, sub-second closing times, and a proof-of-history pipeline that sequences transactions on a single ledger.
Both paths deliver transactions that feel instant to users who click “send,” but the security models differ widely when you ask what happens in the seconds, minutes, or days after that click.
The question facing builders in 2026 is not which chain runs faster in a vacuum; what matters is which one is more efficient in a practical application. It’s a matter of which model provides less friction for the application they want to build, and how much they are willing to pay, in terms of latency, complexity or exit time, for the security each system provides.
Monolithic speed versus modular finality
Solana’s architecture brings together inclusion, confirmation and economic finality in one 400 millisecond slot when the network is running smoothly.
Validators vote on blocks using a proof-of-history clock that timestamps transactions before consensus, allowing the network to pipeline throughput without waiting for traditional BFT roundtrips.
Users will see confirmation streams after two-thirds of the votes on the block, typically within half a second, with full finality arriving about 12 seconds later.
Jakob Povšič, co-founder of Temporal, described the user-centric result in a note:
“For most end users, a transaction is considered ‘confirmed’ once two-thirds of the network has voted for its block, which takes less than half a second.”
Ethereum’s modular design separates these steps. Rollups arrange transactions off-chain: Arbitrum produces blocks every 250 milliseconds, while Optimism produces blocks every two seconds. As a result, users see a “soft” finality at the time the sequencer accepts the transaction.
But economic finality is only established when the overview places its status root at L1 and closes the dispute or validity window.
Optimistic rollups impose seven-day challenge periods before users can withdraw to the mainnet, while ZK rollups compress that to 15 minutes or a few hours by submitting validations.
Will Papper, co-founder of Syndicate, argued that the delay matters less than it seems. In a note he added:
“Many instant bridges are comfortable working with unrounded rollup states anyway. L2s provide sub-second captures for apps that rarely bridge to L1, but applications that require frequent mainnet settlements incur a time cost that Solana avoids.”
What users actually feel
The difference in architecture changes the way each system handles congestion, costs, and disruptions. On Solana, the base fee remains set at 5,000 lamports per signature, approximately $0.0001, while priority fees allow users to bid for inclusion during traffic peaks.
Deployment-weighted quality of service routes high-priority transactions from known validators faster, and local reimbursement markets prevent individual hot accounts from clogging the scheduler.
Most retail transactions end up under one cent. When the system fails, it fails globally: Solana’s shutdown on February 6, 2024 lasted four hours and 46 minutes after an older loader bug forced validators to restart the cluster.
L2 fees fluctuate with Ethereum’s blob market. Still, the introduction of Dencun’s blob in March 2024 and Pectra’s capacity increases in May 2025 pushed typical “send” transactions into single-digit cents on large rollups.
The failure modes differ: an L2 sequencer that goes offline pauses user activity on that packet, even if Ethereum L1 is operating normally.
The 45-minute outage of Base in September 2023 and the multi-hour disruptions of Optimism and Starknet in 2024-2025 illustrate the local risk.
Fault resilience and force-include mechanisms provide escape options, but UX during an outage depends on whether the affected rollup has these backstops implemented.
Challenge windows and withdrawal reality
The optimistic seven-day total withdrawal period exists because fraud proofs require time for validators to submit challenges if the execution was incorrect.
OP Mainnet, Base and Arbitrum all enforce the delay. Papper suggested that the delay has become invisible, saying that “ideally these internals are invisible from a UX perspective.”
Third-party bridges ease the delay by lending liquidity, allowing users to experience near-instant exits for a small fee. ZK rollups eliminate the challenge period by submitting proofs of validity, allowing withdrawals in minutes to hours.
Solana has no withdrawal period because transactions are settled directly on L1. The unified state means that there is no secondary chain from which we can escape, so ‘finality’ and ‘withdrawal’ coincide in the same twelve-second threshold.
That simplicity removes a layer of bridging trust, but concentrates all risk of failure in the validator client and network stack.
MEV extraction on Solana flows through Jito’s block engine, which validators integrate into the auction bundle space.
Stake-weighted quality of service (QoS) provides preferential treatment for high-stake validators, improving predictability for seekers but raising questions about fairness for smaller participants.
Ethereum’s journey aims to strengthen inclusion guarantees at the protocol level. The 2026 “Glamsterdam” upgrade plans to entrench the separation between filer and builder and introduce inclusion lists that force filers to include specific transactions within one or two slots.
Papper argued that inclusion guarantees are more important than the finality of one slot:
“The next most beneficial item is inclusion guarantees, as it gives apps more certainty about transaction inclusion, providing better UX.”
Firedancer vs modular maturity
Solana’s catalyst is Firedancer, the independent validator client developed by Jump Crypto. In public demos, throughput was much greater than the current Agave client.
Povšič emphasized that the culture change “what is now fundamentally different from the failure risks of the past is the development culture.” He added that the core teams have taken an approach that puts safety and reliability first.
The Firedancer rollout introduces customer diversity, reduces the risk of one-time deployments, and increases latency and throughput caps. Alpenglow’s running time aims for a finality of less than 150 milliseconds.
Ethereum’s roadmap stacks three short-term upgrades. Pectra, delivered in May 2025, increased blob throughput. Scheduled for release this quarter, Fusaka will deliver PeerDAS: a peer-based data availability sampling system that allows nodes to verify data without downloading entire blobs.
Glamsterdam will bring anchored PBS and inclusion lists in 2026, strengthening resistance to censorship. OP Stack chains and Arbitrum are mature, fail-safe systems that enable permissionless validation.
Papper predicted that cheaper data availability (DA) will deliver the most immediate benefits:
“Cheaper data availability leads to lower costs. This ensures that every transaction on a rollup becomes cheaper.”
Who should build where
High frequency trading and market making require the shortest possible time to withdrawal. Solana’s single-slot path, stake-weighted QoS, and Jito bundles deliver that when milliseconds matter.
Povšič argued that the infrastructure has matured:
“We’ve come a long way… from an NFT coin that almost brought down the chain at the end of 2021, to Solana surviving the recent Black Friday without breaking a sweat.”
On-chain games and social applications that rarely settle on L1 are a good fit for L2s. Arbitrum’s 250-millisecond blocks feel instant, and post-Dencun fees rival Solana’s sub-penny economics.
Builders inherit Ethereum’s settlement layer when needed. Papper noted that preconfirmations further compress latency:
“I think 200 ms from the pre-confirmations is already unnoticeable for most users.”
Payments and consumer DeFi rely on fees and exit flows. If users rarely 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 mentioned the developer advantage:
“Beyond fees and performance, the biggest benefit of Solana for developers is the simplicity of the global shared state. You don’t have to deal with bridging or the added complexity of data availability.”
The competitive question in 2026 is not whether Solana or Ethereum individually are faster or cheaper. The question is which model better meets the latency, cost and finality requirements of the application a builder wants to deliver.
Solana bets that collapsing execution, settlement, and finality into one 400-millisecond slot creates the lowest-friction path, and Firedancer pushes those boundaries further.
Meanwhile, Ethereum is betting that separating concerns, L1 for settlement, L2s for execution, allows each layer to specialize and scale independently, with cheaper blobs and mature fault proofs narrowing the UX gap.
Users care about the composite metric: time to confirmed UX multiplied by cost multiplied by reliability. Both ecosystems optimized different parts of that curve in 2025, and the 2026 upgrades will test whether monolithic throughput or modular scaling delivers the better product at scale.
The answer will depend on the application.
That’s not a hedge, but rather an acknowledgment that the two models made different architectural tradeoffs, and that those tradeoffs produce measurably different results for different workloads.
