Original author: 0x Todd, Partner at Nothing Research (X: @0x_Todd )
A few days ago, I saw a post saying: Now that the amount of Solana staked has exceeded the amount of ETH staked, does it mean that the security of the Solana chain has exceeded that of ETH? This statement is so confusing that many people actually believe it.
Actually, this is not the case. Let’s look at some data first:
The pledged data of ETH is 34M ETH, worth about 61 billion US dollars; the pledged data of Sol is 388M SOL, worth about 58.7 billion US dollars.
SOL has indeed reached the same level as ETH. If it was before ETH rebounded a few days ago, it was even slightly lower than SOL. (Data source: Beaconcha Solana Beach). Considering that the attack threshold of the PoS mechanism of both is about 33%, it seems that the theoretical attack difficulty is the same.
33% can block the block, 51% can create a new longest chain, and 67% can directly double spend. However, in terms of practical difficulty, attacking ETH is much more difficult than Solana.
PS: Of course, assuming that the success rate of attacking SOL is 0.001%, the difficulty of attacking ETH may be 0.0001%. Although there is a big difference, it should be noted that both are still extremely low-probability events. The reasons are (1) node concentration and (2) the maturity of staking infrastructure.
1. Node Concentration
Let’s first assume a situation: there is a magical hacker who uses a 0-day vulnerability to successfully hack into the computer rooms of Amazon and mainstream cloud service providers.
So, controlling Solana > 50% requires taking over the top 43 nodes simultaneously. Hard, but not impossible.
As for ETH, a single node can stake up to 32 ETH, so 1,187,000 nodes are needed, which sounds like an impossible task.
Of course, this is unfair to Sol, because ETH is essentially run by many node operators, and one entity may own tens of thousands of nodes. So, judging from the operators currently listed on Rated...
You will find that all registered ETH node operators combined only account for 47.5%, not even reaching the 50% threshold. It is still an impossible task.
The reason is that ETH, as an ancient public chain, has really seen real PoS attacks in ancient times, and has made a lot of preparations to prevent this potential danger, such as encouraging retail investors to participate in staking. Ethereums 32 ETH threshold is not high, while Solana has very high requirements for servers, and the monthly cost is 5-10 times that of ETH, and this is just for entry. Therefore, if retail investors want to break even, they must stake at least 10K SOL, and the yield is lower than Jito.
2. Infrastructure Maturity
Many ETH staking infrastructures, including @LidoFinance@Obol_Collective, have also done a lot of homework.
For example, Lido requires nodes to use Amazons data centers less and niche data centers more. Use less mainstream clients and support more niche clients. In addition, Lido also specifically allocates 4% of ETH to DVT infrastructure such as Obol and SSV.
Obol said it is 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 co-manage a node, you can set it to 3/4, so that once a node goes offline, other nodes can immediately take over. If you set it to 10, then you can set it to 7/10, which tolerates up to three nodes going offline.
Note: On ETH and most PoS chains, disconnection is also a form of [evil]. If 33% of the nodes are offline, the chain will be paralyzed.
Moreover, Obol is unique in that it implements clustering through a client, so your private key (shard) will not be uploaded to the chain, which is more secure. This is achieved through DKG (I can share DKG later when I have time).
Obol has just been launched on the mainnet recently. If you are interested, you can go and mine it. @ebunker_eth is fine.
Therefore, the infrastructure that ETH has prepared specifically for staking, such as Obol, is not currently available in Solana.
Of course, I am not criticizing one over the other, both chains are very safe. However, although the capital stakes have reached the same level, in terms of security, ETH is still slightly better due to the concentration of nodes and the maturity of infrastructure.
