Stake market capitalization surpasses Ethereum, is the Solana network more secure?

A few days ago, I saw a post that said: "Now the staking volume of Solana has exceeded that of ETH, does this mean that the security of the Solana chain has surpassed that of ETH?"

This statement is so misleading that many people actually believe it 😂.

Actually, that's not the case. Let's look at some data:

• The staking data of ETH is 34M ETH, worth about 61 billion dollars.
• The staking data of Sol is 388 M SOL, worth about 58.7 billion US dollars.

SOL has indeed reached the same level as ETH, and just a few days ago, before ETH's rebound, it was even slightly lower than SOL. (Data source: Beaconcha & Solana Beach).

Considering that the attack threshold of the PoS mechanism for both is around 33%, the theoretical difficulty of the attack seems to be consistent.

33% can hinder block creation, 51% can produce a new longest chain, and 67% can directly double spend.

However, in terms of practical difficulty, attacking ETH is significantly more challenging than Solana.

PS: Of course, assuming the success rate of attacking SOL is 0.001%, the difficulty of attacking ETH might be 0.0001%. Although there is a significant difference, it is important to note that both still belong to extremely low probability events.

The reasons are (1) node concentration (2) maturity of staking infrastructure.

1. Node Centralization

Let's assume a scenario: there is a magical hacker who successfully hacks into Amazon and mainstream cloud service providers' data centers using a 0-day vulnerability.

So, controlling Solana > 50% requires obtaining the top 43 nodes at the same time. It's difficult, but not impossible.

For ETH, a single node can stake a maximum of 32 ETH, so it requires obtaining 1,187,000 nodes, which sounds like an impossible task.

Of course, this is unfair to Sol because essentially ETH is also run by numerous node operators, and a single entity might own tens of thousands of nodes. So, currently, from the perspective of the operators listed on Rated...

You'll find that all registered ETH node operators together are only 47.5%, and they don't even touch the 50% threshold. It is still an impossible task.

The reason is that ETH, as an ancient public chain, has indeed experienced real PoS attacks from ancient times, and has made a lot of preparations to guard against this potential danger, such as encouraging retail investors to participate in staking.

The 32 ETH threshold for Ethereum is not high, while Solana has high server requirements, with monthly costs being 5-10 times that of ETH, and this is just the entry level. Therefore, if retail investors want to break even, they need to stake at least 10K SOL or more, and the yield is even lower than Jito.

2. Infrastructure Maturity

Many ETH staking infrastructures, including @LidoFinance and @Obol_Collective, have also done a lot of homework.

For example, Lido requests nodes to use less of Amazon's data centers and more of niche data centers. Use mainstream clients less and support niche clients more. In addition, Lido has also specifically allocated 4% of ETH for DVT infrastructure such as Obol and SSV.

Obol is based on DVT technology. You can think of it as your nodes being managed by a cluster rather than a single entity.

For example, if 4 people manage a node, you can require it to be a 3/4, so that once a node goes offline, the other nodes can immediately take over. If you set it to 10, you can set it to 7/10, allowing for a maximum of three nodes to go offline.

Note: On ETH and most PoS chains, going offline is also a form of [malicious behavior]. If 33% of the nodes go offline, the chain will be paralyzed.

Moreover, the uniqueness of Obol lies in the fact that it achieves clustering through a client, so your private keys (fragments) are not uploaded to the chain, making it more secure. This is implemented through DKG (I can share more about DKG when I have time in the future).

Recently, Obol just launched its mainnet, and those interested can give it a try by mining it, just @ebunker_eth.

Therefore, infrastructure like Obol, which is specifically prepared for staking ETH, is currently not available on Solana.

Of course, it's not a matter of one being better than the other 😂. Both chains are very secure. However, even though the funding stakes have reached the same level, in terms of security, due to node centralization and infrastructure maturity, ETH still has a slight edge.