Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…What we're talking about is almost like the wire level. When you send an international wire, how many of those per second occur? Bitcoin could probably handle that and maybe that's fine. Ethereum is trying to do something more sophisticated, where you have tokens, you have governance, you have these communities, and they need to trade and move money between them. A lot of this activity occurs on centralized exchanges. People deposit their tokens there, they trade at a high frequency, and then they move them back to Ethereum. Also a bunch of it occurs in Uniswap and these automatic markets. The cornerstone of DeFi is that trading bit in Uniswap. My understanding of what Ethereum today, depending on gas costs, is somewhere around 11 to maybe 20 transactions per second. I think when we're seeing fees over $40 a transaction, Ethereum was doing 1.6 million transactions per day. Now that fees have dropped to under $1 per transaction. I think today, it's under $1 and it's doing about 1.2 million transactions per day. It's the same order of magnitude as Bitcoin and way more complex transactions because there are smart contracts that are executing. There are just a lot more interesting use cases of this decentralized computer but still relatively the same speed as Bitcoin. I would say that it's twice as much. That's enough to do a ton of really cool stuff. That's enough for governance for a bunch of communities to form. The growth that you're seeing in Ethereum is real. There are real people using the network just for what it was designed for. That's really cool, but it really needs this change from either ETH 1 to a chartered system, or ETH 1 to a bunch of roll ups or layer twos, or however you want to design that to really take on a billion users. That's just not going to happen there. What we set out to build Solana was, I think we just never thought of Solana as replacing digital gold, sovereign money, or anything like that.…

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