<\/p>\n
Apple versus Android. Windows versus UNIX. They\u2019re examples of classic tech rivalries that in many ways, Mert Mumtaz says, resemble the blockchain clash between the integrated ecosystem of Solana and the modular world of Ethereum.<\/p>\n
And in any free market tech rivalry Mumtaz can recall from the past, the leader didn\u2019t retain total market superiority in the long term.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI have never seen a piece of technology that has been 95% of the market \u2014 and people are betting on it to keep growing in the next five to ten years, in terms of relative market share.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEven Windows didn\u2019t have that dominance for long,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Yet, he says on the Lightspeed podcast (Spotify<\/a>\/Apple<\/a>), people seem to think that the EVM<\/a>, or Ethereum Virtual Machine, is going to retain its 95% dominance over rivals into perpetuity.<\/p>\n The Helius CEO is betting \u201cwith a hundred percent conviction\u201d that EVM competitors like the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)<\/a> and MoveVM<\/a> are \u201cextremely under-indexed on \u2014 and the market is asymmetric.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be the case that 5% of the market is SVM and Move combined, and then 95% is EVM perpetually, over a ten-year time horizon,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s just never happened.\u201d<\/p>\n Mumtaz says that he sees the SVM in particular rising in popularity, with a broad range of developments taking place, including work from entities like Eclipse, Firedancer<\/a> and even Visa.\u00a0<\/p>\n Read more:<\/strong> Solana offers solutions to banking\u2019s \u2018bizarre inefficiencies,\u2019 says Mumtaz<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThese things are slowly sneaking up on you until one day you\u2019re going to be like, \u2018Wait a minute. There\u2019s actually a lot of stuff happening here. What happened?\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Mumtaz claims that the SVM and MoveVM are \u201cobjectively better pieces of technology than the EVM\u201d and now, he says, \u201cthey\u2019re getting distribution through the modular thesis of blockchains, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more: <\/strong>Eclipse takes a \u2018best of all worlds\u2019 approach to solve scalability trilemma<\/a><\/p>\n The market also tends to overlook the fact, according to Mumtaz, that \u201cintegrated\u201d chains like Solana are still, in many ways, effectively modular.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey have different components with different core teams internally working on them. It\u2019s just all integrated into a single message bus,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s still modular. It\u2019s just, they don\u2019t outsource certain stuff.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As has always been the case in the history of software, both integrated and modular-focused approaches must face some trade-offs, he says. \u201cIntegrated technologies throughout history have shown very high degrees of success,\u201d he says. \u201cSo have some modular stacks, as well. So that\u2019s to say, they both work.\u201d<\/p>\n Mumtaz criticizes the narrative that layer-2s<\/a> have already \u201cwon\u201d as the chosen blockchain scaling solution. \u201cWhat have they won? We have like, five users on-chain,\u201d he chuckles.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not sure it\u2019s time to declare victory. Let\u2019s just keep working on it.\u201d<\/p>\n Mumtaz explains that a \u201cweird irony\u201d of Solana is that, as a global state machine, it is capable of supporting \u201cdifferent use cases that are not composable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe there\u2019s different communities that form within there, which actually might help you with modularity in the end.\u201d He mentions the example of state compression, a Solana innovation that emerged from concerns around the high costs of NFT minting<\/a>.<\/p>\n He says the state compression technology<\/a> is \u201ca core piece of infrastructure that basically is enshrined onto the RPC spec itself.\u201d Innovations like state compression can be added to the chain quickly because the system is more integrated, Mumtaz says. \u201cThe communications overhead is less.\u201d<\/p>\n Mumtaz says that some modular proponents criticize SVM for its purported inability to \u201cinnovate in parallel with different parts of the stack.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI know this to not be the case,\u201d he says, \u201cHelius is an infrastructure company \u2014 and we work with other teams who are doing exactly that.\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t miss the next big story \u2013 join our\u00a0free daily newsletter<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\nNot time to declare victory just yet<\/h2>\n
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