Neon Labs' Solana Move Tempts Developers with Scaling Power

Neon Lab’s announcement that it will offer its Ethereum Virtual Machine scaling solution on Solana made quite a splash this week. It also prompted a cryptic response from 0xMaki, Sushiswap’s “fearless leader,” as he’s identified on the project’s website.

0xMaki responded to Neon Labs’ tweet with a string of pencil on paper emojis, the sun, and a sushi one.

It’s hard to know what 0xMaki meant, but it seems likely he and the developers of other leading protocols will be taking a long look at deploying to Solana through Neon Labs. Sushiswap already supports 14 chains, according to the project’s website. And the scaling Solana offers to apps on a full-to-the-brim Ethereum network may be too tempting for DeFi developers to pass up.

With the move, Neon Labs, a blockchain software company, is about to make it easier to port Ethereum apps to the Solana blockchain. The firm has already deployed its cross-chain EVM solution to the Solana testnet and plans to move to mainnet in the third quarter of 2021, the firm announced on Twitter on July 20.

DeFi Protocol

The EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine, is essentially a rulebook for the blockchain, and it dictates how the protocol’s state should change, block-to-block, as it receives inputs from users. That can include sending a transaction or depositing tokens into a DeFi protocol.

Neon’s offering “allows any Ethereum application to be run on Solana without any changes to its codebase, including Uniswap, SushiSwap, 0x, and MakerDAO,” according to the project’s whitepaper. It also means key Ethereum tools like the Solidity programming language and Metamask will be compatible with Solana.

This means that Ethereum developers will soon be able to deploy their apps to Solana, a blockchain which can process 50K transactions per second at $0.00025 apiece, according to its website. Ethereum stands at 13.85 transactions per second with a median transaction fee of $1.88 at the time of writing, according to multi-blockchain block explorer Blockchain. The tradeoff is that Solana requires more specialized hardware to run nodes, which results in a more centralized network.

“Ethereum is a thriving blockchain ecosystem that has a lot to offer to Dapp developers and users in terms of tools and infrastructure. At the same time, Solana is attractive to many due to its technical characteristics and is perceived as an emerging market,” said Marina Guryeva, Neon Labs’CEO, in the press release. “Neon EVM Daap developers will be easily tapping into the Solana market and offer users great experience without any difference in terms of interface or tools used.”