0xTodd: Solana stake volume exceeds ETH, does this mean its security surpasses Ethereum?

A few days ago, I saw a post that said:

"Does the fact that Solana's staking volume has now surpassed that of ETH mean that the security of the Solana chain has exceeded that of ETH?"

This statement is so misleading that many people truly believe it.

Actually, that's not the case.

Let's look at some data:

The staking data for ETH is 34M ETH, worth around 61 billion US dollars. The staking data of Sol is 388 M SOL, worth about 5.87 billion dollars.

SOL has indeed reached the same level as ETH, and 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 for the PoS mechanisms of both is around 33%, the theoretical difficulty of the attack seems consistent.

33% can impede block production, 51% can create a new longest chain, and 67% can directly enable double spending.

However, in terms of practical implementation, the difficulty of attacking ETH far exceeds that of Solana.

PS: Of course, assuming the success rate of attacking SOL is 0.001%, the difficulty of attacking ETH may 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) the maturity of Staking infrastructure.

1. Node Centralization

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

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

As 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 in essence, ETH is also operated by numerous node operators, and a single entity may own tens of thousands of nodes. As for the operators currently listed on Rated...

You will find that all registered ETH node operators combined only account for 47.5%, and they can't even touch the 50% threshold. It is still an impossible task.

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

Ethereum's 32 ETH threshold isn't that high, while Solana is server-demanding, costing 5-10 times more per month than ETH, and that's just getting started. Therefore, if retail investors want to break even, they must stake at least 10K SOL or more, and the yield is 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 asks nodes to use less of Amazon's data centers and more 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.

As for Obol, it is DVT technology. You can think of it as your node being managed by a cluster rather than a single entity.

For example, if 4 people are jointly managing 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, then you can set it to 7/10, allowing for a maximum of three nodes to go offline. Note: On ETH and most PoS chains, disconnection is also one of the forms of evil. If 33% of the nodes go offline, the chain goes down.

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

Recently, Obol just launched its mainnet. If you're interested, you can try mining it by using @ebunker_eth.

Therefore, the infrastructure like Obol that is specifically prepared for Staking with 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.