Original author: 0xTodd, partner at Nothing Research

A few days ago, I saw a post that said: "Now the amount of Solana staked has surpassed that of ETH. Does this mean that the security of the Solana chain has surpassed that of ETH?" This statement is very misleading and has led many people to actually believe it.

Actually, it's not. First, let's look at some data:

The staking data for ETH is 34M ETH, valued at around 61 billion USD; the staking data for Sol is 388M SOL, valued at around 58.7 billion USD.

SOL has indeed reached the same level as ETH, and before the recent rebound of ETH a few days ago, it was even slightly lower than SOL. (Data source: Beaconcha & Solana Beach). Considering that both have a PoS mechanism attack threshold of around 33%, theoretical attack difficulty seems to be consistent.

33% can obstruct block production, 51% can create 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 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 centralization (2) the maturity of Staking infrastructure.

1. Node Concentration

Let's assume a situation: there is a magical hacker who successfully hacks into the data centers of Amazon and mainstream cloud service providers using a 0day vulnerability. Then, controlling Solana > 50% requires simultaneously taking over the top 43 nodes. It's difficult, but not impossible.

For ETH, a single node can stake a maximum of 32 ETH, which means we need to reach 1,187,000 nodes, which sounds like an impossible task. Of course, this calculation is unfair to Sol, because essentially ETH is also operated by numerous node operators, and a single entity can own tens of thousands of nodes. However, looking at the operators currently listed on Rated... you will find that all registered ETH node operators combined account for only 47.5%, and they can't even reach the 50% threshold. It's 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 requirements for servers, with monthly costs being 5-10 times that of ETH, and this is just for entry. 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@Obol_Collective, have also done a lot of homework. For example, Lido requires nodes to use less of Amazon's computer room and more niche computer room. Use less mainstream clients and more niche clients. In addition, Lido has dedicated 4% of ETH to DVT infrastructure such as Obol and SSV. In the case of Obol, it's DVT technology. You can think of it to mean that your nodes are collectively managed by a cluster, rather than a single entity. For example, if you have 4 people co-managing a node, you can ask for it to be a 3/4, so that once one node goes offline, the other nodes can be taken on top immediately. If you set it to 10, then you can set it to 7/10 and tolerate up to three node drops.

Note: On ETH and most PoS chains, disconnection is also a form of [malicious behavior]. If 33% of the nodes go offline, the chain will paralyze. Moreover, the uniqueness of Obol lies in its implementation of clustering through a single client, which means your private keys (fragments) are not uploaded to the chain, making it more secure, and this is achieved through DKG (I can share more about DKG when I have time). Recently, Obol just launched on the mainnet, and those interested can also mine it; you can do so by using @ebunker_eth.

Therefore, infrastructure like Obol that is specifically prepared for Staking on 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, despite the fact that the funds staked have reached the same level, in terms of security, ETH still has a slight edge due to node concentration and the maturity of its infrastructure.

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