SOL Is Closing In on ETH

Solana's VM (commonly referred to as Solana Runtime or BPF VM) is more advanced than Ethereum's EVM in several aspects, mainly reflected in performance architecture, parallel processing capability, and underlying design. Here are some of its main advantages over EVM:

1. High-performance Execution: Native Support for Parallel Processing

Solana VM (BPF VM): Based on Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) technology, it significantly increases throughput through the mechanism of 'parallel execution of transactions'. With 'read-write set analysis between transactions', as long as two transactions do not access the same account or state, they can execute simultaneously.

EVM: Transactions within each block are executed serially, regardless of whether there are dependencies between them, which significantly limits performance.

2. Parallel Execution Engine Based on Account Model Design

Solana: Each transaction explicitly specifies the read and write accounts, allowing the VM to statically analyze whether there are conflicts between transactions. This 'deterministic account declaration' mechanism is a prerequisite for parallelization.

EVM: Any transaction can dynamically read and write the state of any address, making it impossible to statically determine dependency relationships before execution, hindering parallelism.

3. Low Latency, High Throughput

Solana: Block time is ~400ms, with a target processing capacity of up to 50,000 TPS (theoretically). Uses an optimized mempool and Gossip network broadcasting mechanism.

Ethereum (Post-PoS): Average block time is ~12 seconds, with TPS typically around 10–30 (excluding L2).

4. More General Language Support and Compilation Targets

Solana VM: Supports the development of smart contracts using languages like Rust, C, C++, compiled to eBPF, providing better performance.

EVM: Mainly uses Solidity and Vyper, compiled to bytecode, with more limited language choices and extensibility.

5. Closer to Low-level Hardware Optimization

The design of BPF VM is closer to the architecture of operating system kernels (originally used for Linux kernel security tools), providing high-performance execution without sacrificing security.

Solana extensively employs modern system programming techniques such as concurrent scheduling and execution, memory pool management, and batch verification.

6. More Advanced State Storage Mechanism

Solana uses a high-performance account state storage + hash verification mechanism (combining RocksDB + Merkle Tree + snapshot), which is faster than EVM's current Patricia Merkle Trie and is more efficient in reading and recovery.