How Solana and Binance Smart Chain Could Take Ethereum's Lead

**Laura Shin** (0:00)
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Today's episode is sponsored by EY Blockchain. Ernst & Young is committed to supporting integration of the world's business ecosystems on the public Ethereum blockchain. Today's topic is whether Ethereum needs to worry about these ETH killers, the new generation of them. The prime examples being Solana and Binance Smart Chain. Here to discuss are Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix, and Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital. Welcome, Kain and Kyle.

**Kain Warwick** (2:11)
Thanks for having us.

**Kyle Samani** (2:11)
Hey, Laura. Good to be back on the show. I'm looking forward to this. This will be a fun, spicy, spicy debate.

**Laura Shin** (2:20)
I know.
That was exactly what Kain and I were discussing when we were figuring out who his conversation partner should be. So listeners should know that the impetus for the show was a recent tweet storm that Kain wrote up saying that he was concerned about the Solana and Binance Smart Chain communities, quote, genuinely gaining organic traction, much more so than say EOS or Tron of the last cycle. Kain, can you explain your thoughts more on this score? Yeah.

**Kain Warwick** (2:50)
So I think back in 2017, 2018, Tron and EOS made a pretty decent attempt at generating some traction and getting smart contract developers to migrate.
Certainly EOS threw a lot of money at that process. And we just saw that they didn't really get much traction. Obviously, it was a different part of the market cycle. It was a bear market. It was much harder to get traction back then. But what we're seeing now, especially with the high gas prices on Ethereum, is that there appears to be a bit of an opportunity for chains like Solana and Binance Smart Chain to really start chipping away at the ETH dominance. And my thread was really about a bit of a wake up call. I think that the community can't just be oblivious to this, that this is actually happening and we need to at least consider the momentum that these chains are getting.

**Laura Shin** (3:47)
And Kyle, I'm just curious, do you agree with Kain's description? And I'm assuming that you would not be super concerned about this because you have invested in both Solana and Binance. So what's your take on what you're seeing?

**Kyle Samani** (4:06)
Yeah, so I'll preface this whole podcast episode by saying that Multicoin is quite long ETH, more long ETH than Bitcoin, and we're even more long on Solana and Binance. So we're long on all of the primary subjects of this conversation. We have felt for a long time that the Ethereum approach to scaling was just not going to be sufficient. Not that it won't work, but it will just not be enough.
And two years ago, it was kind of a fuzzy claim, but there wasn't enough kind of clarity on how exactly it was going to work. But our intuition was that it just wasn't going to get there. And fast forward today, and we have a reasonable sense of how the ZK Rollups are going to work, and how the Opposites Rollups are going to work. And we can kind of sort of reason about how the interoperability between these things will work. And I feel more convicted than ever that the scaling solutions that are here today for the Ethereum ecosystem are simply not enough. I think Solana is not sufficient by probably two to three orders of magnitude. I think what the Ethereum ecosystem is proposing is by five or six orders of magnitude away from being sufficient. But I've just always felt we have to just try other angles and see where these things go.