The debate pitting Ethereum and Solana as rival L1s overlooks how their architectures will fundamentally diverge in 2025. Ethereum has evolved into a modular rollup payment layer, while Solana has doubled monolithic throughput.
Ethereum abandoned the monolithic chain race several years ago as its roadmap treats the base layer as payment infrastructure. At the same time, a Layer 2 (L2) rollup is performed to post the state route back to mainnet.
Solana took the opposite bet with a single unified ledger, sub-second slot times, and a proof-of-history pipeline that orders transactions on a single global ledger.
Both paths provide a transaction that feels instantaneous when a user clicks “send,” but the security models differ greatly when it comes to what happens in the seconds, minutes, or days after the click.
The question facing builders in 2026 is not which chain works faster on its own. Which is more efficient in real-world applications? The key is which model provides lower friction for the application you want to build, and how much you are willing to pay in terms of latency, complexity, and completion time for the guarantees each system provides.
Monolithic speed and modular finality
Solana’s architecture combines inclusion, confirmation, and economic finality into a single 400ms slot when the network is running smoothly.
Validators vote on blocks using a history-proof clock that timestamps transactions before consensus, allowing the network to pipeline throughput without waiting for traditional BFT round trips.
Users will see a confirmation stream once two-thirds of the staked votes on a block are complete, typically within 0.5 seconds, with full finality appearing approximately 12 seconds later.
Temporal co-founder Jakob Povšič explains the results for users in a note:
“For most end users, a transaction is considered ‘confirmed’ when two-thirds of the network votes for the block. This takes less than half a second. ”
Ethereum’s modular design separates these steps. Rollups sequence transactions off-chain. Arbitrum generates a block every 250 milliseconds, while Optimism generates a block every 2 seconds. As a result, users perceive “soft” finality the moment the sequencer accepts a transaction.
However, economic finality only arrives when the rollup posts its state route to L1 and the dispute or validity window closes.
Optimistic rollups impose a seven-day challenge period before users can withdraw from mainnet, whereas ZK rollups reduce that to 15 minutes or hours by submitting proof of validity.
Syndicate co-founder Will Papper insisted the delay was not as significant as it appeared. He added in the memo:
“Many instant bridges work comfortably in an unfinalized rolled-up state anyway. L2 provides sub-second inclusion for apps that rarely bridge to L1, but applications that frequently require mainnet payments pay time costs that Solana avoids.”
What users actually feel
Architectural differences restructure how each system handles congestion, charges, and failures. At Solana, base pricing is fixed at 5,000 Ramports (approximately $0.0001) per signature, but priority pricing allows users to bid for inclusion during spikes in traffic.
Stake-weighted quality of service routes high-priority transactions faster from known validators, and local fee markets ensure that no single hot account clogs the scheduler.
Most retail transactions occur for less than 1 cent. When a system fails, it fails overall. Solana’s outage on February 6, 2024 lasted 4 hours and 46 minutes after a bug in the legacy loader forced a validator to restart the cluster.
L2 fees vary depending on the Ethereum BLOB market. Still, with the introduction of Dencun’s BLOB in March 2024 and Pectra’s capacity increase in May 2025, the typical “send” transaction in a major rollup has been reduced to single digit cents.
Failure modes are different. When an L2 sequencer goes offline, user activity on that rollup will be suspended, even if Ethereum L1 is working normally.
The 45-minute outage of Base in September 2023 and the multi-hour disruption of Optimism and Starknet in 2024-2025 illustrate localized risks.
Although failure prevention and forced inclusion mechanisms provide a refuge, the UX during an outage depends on whether the affected rollup implements these backstops.
The Challenge Window and the Reality of Withdrawal
The optimistic roll-up withdrawal window of 7 days exists because proof of fraud takes time for validators to submit a challenge if the execution is incorrect.
OP Mainnet, Base, Arbitrum all force delays. Papper suggested that delays are no longer visible, saying, “Ideally, these internal structures are invisible from a UX perspective.”
Third-party bridges reduce delays by lending liquidity, allowing users to experience near-instant payments for a small fee. ZK Rollup eliminates the challenge period and allows withdrawals in minutes to hours by providing proof of validity.
Solana does not have a withdrawal window as transactions are settled directly at L1. The unified state means there is no secondary chain to exit, so “finality” and “withdrawal” fall under the same 12 second threshold.
This simplicity removes the bridge layer of trust, but concentrates all failure risk in the validation client and network stack.
MEV extraction in Solana is done through Jito’s block engine, and validators are integrated into the auction bundle space.
Stake-weighted quality of service (QoS) provides preferential treatment to high-stake validators, increasing predictability for searchers but raising questions about fairness for smaller participants.
Ethereum’s policy aims to strengthen inclusion guarantees at the protocol level. The 2026 “Gramsteldam” upgrade will introduce an inclusion list that enforces proposer-constructor separation and forces proposers to include a given transaction in one or two slots.
Papper argued that inclusion guarantees are more important than single-slot finality.
“The next most useful item is inclusion guarantees, which allow apps to be more confident about transaction inclusion and provide a better UX.”
Firedancer and module maturity
Solana’s catalyst is Firedancer, an independent validator client developed by Jump Crypto. Public demos demonstrated throughput that far exceeds current Agave clients.
Povsic emphasized that the culture change is “what is fundamentally different now than the outage risk of the past is the development culture.” He added that the core team is taking an approach that puts security and reliability first.
The Firedancer rollout introduces client diversity, reduces the risk of a single implementation, and increases latency and throughput limits. The Alpenglow runtime targets finality of less than 150ms.
Ethereum’s roadmap is stacked with three near-term upgrades. Pectra, delivered in May 2025, improved BLOB throughput. Fusaka is scheduled to ship this quarter. PeerDAS is a peer-based data availability sampling system that allows nodes to validate data without downloading the full blob.
In Gramsterdam 2026, PBS and target lists will be strictly defined and resistance to censorship will be strengthened. OP Stack chains and Arbitrum are mature fault-proof systems that enable permissionless validation.
Papper predicted that cheaper data availability (DA) would provide the most immediate benefits.
“The cheaper the data available, the cheaper the fees. This ensures that every transaction in the rollup is cheaper.”
who should build where
High frequency trading and market making requires the shortest possible time to enter a trade. Solana’s single-slot path, stake-weighted QoS, and Jito bundles get you there when milliseconds matter.
Povsic insisted that the infrastructure is mature.
“We have come a long way… from NFT mints nearly shutting 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 in L1 fit well in L2. Arbitrum’s 250ms blocks feel instantaneous, and post-Dencun rates compete with Solana’s subpenny economics.
Builders inherit Ethereum’s payment layer as needed. Papper pointed out that pre-checking further reduces latency.
“I think 200 milliseconds from a pre-check is already imperceptible to most users.”
Payments and consumer DeFi are driven by fees and exit flows. L2 UX is in direct competition with Solana when users rarely bridge to L1. If your application requires frequent mainnet payments or atomic composability across large numbers of accounts, Solana’s unified ledger simplifies your architecture.
Povsic highlighted the benefits for developers:
“Beyond price and performance, Solana’s biggest benefit for developers is the simplicity of global shared state; they don’t have to deal with the extra complexity of bridging or data availability.”
The competition question in 2026 is not whether Solana or Ethereum is faster or cheaper on its own. The question is which model better fits the latency, cost, and finality requirements of the applications builders want to ship.
Solana is betting that consolidating execution, settlement, and finality into a single 400ms slot will create the lowest-friction path, and Firedancer pushes the envelope even further.
Ethereum, on the other hand, believes that by separating concerns such as payments at L1 and execution at L2, each layer can specialize and scale independently, narrowing the UX gap with cheaper blobs and mature fault-proofing.
Users value a composite metric that multiplies time to UX review, cost, and reliability. Both ecosystems will optimize different parts of their curves in 2025, and upgrades in 2026 will test whether monolithic throughput or modular scaling can deliver better products at scale.
The answer depends on the application.
This is not a hedge, but rather a recognition that the two models make different architectural tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs produce measurably different results for different workloads.
