Solana
A high-throughput, low-fee blockchain with a runtime distinct from the EVM. Different programming model, different trade-offs.
Solana is not EVM-compatible. Smart contracts (called “programs” on Solana) are written in Rust, deployed as BPF bytecode, and executed by the Solana runtime. The architecture optimises for throughput (thousands of TPS) and low fees, at the cost of higher hardware requirements for validators and a different (some say more centralised) decentralisation profile.
For consumer applications where the user pays sub-cent fees and confirmation is sub-second, Solana is hard to beat. For deep DeFi composability with the EVM ecosystem, the lift to bridge across is non-trivial. The right chain depends on which trade-off matters more for your product.
Worked example of the gotcha that bites EVM teams: Solana’s programming model is account-based, not contract-state-based. You pass every account a transaction touches explicitly, you manage rent on accounts, and you think about parallel execution from the start. A team fluent in Solidity will routinely under-estimate this ramp-up, ship code that works in the happy path, and then hit edge cases around account ownership and rent that have no Ethereum analogue. Budget real time for the model shift; it is not a syntax translation.
The honest trade-off, and the founder mistake of “pick the fast cheap chain”: Solana’s validator hardware requirements are higher than Ethereum’s, so the validator set is smaller, and historically there have been network outages (fewer recently). For consumer payments and high-volume apps that trade-off is usually fine and the throughput is worth it. For a system whose core promise is censorship resistance, examine the threat model carefully before assuming Solana clears the bar.
The ecosystem cost is the other half of the decision. The deep, composable DeFi and tooling that lives on EVM chains does not all exist on Solana, and bridging assets across is a non-trivial, security-sensitive operation in its own right, not a free import. If your product needs to plug into existing on-chain protocols, that pull-toward-EVM is real and should be weighed against Solana’s raw performance. If your product is mostly self-contained and throughput-bound (payments, consumer apps, gaming), the performance wins and the smaller ecosystem rarely bites. Wavect ships in both Solana and EVM across the web3 stack. We have no chain bias; we have a use-case bias.