Apple vs Android. Windows vs UNIX. They are examples of classic tech rivalry that, according to Mert Mumtaz, resembles in many ways the blockchain clash between Solana’s integrated ecosystem and Ethereum’s modular world.
And in every free-market technological rivalry that Mumtaz can recall from the past, the leader did not maintain total market superiority in the long run.
“I’ve never seen a piece of technology that takes 95% of the market – and people are betting that it will continue to grow over the next five to 10 years, in terms of relative market share.”
“Even Windows didn’t have that dominance for long,” he says.
Yet he says on the Lightspeed podcast (Spotify/Apple) that people seem to think the EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine, will maintain its 95% dominance over rivals in perpetuity.
The CEO of Helius bets ‘with one hundred percent conviction’ that EVM competitors such as the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) and MoveVM are ‘extremely under-indexed – and that the market is asymmetric’.
“It won’t be the case that 5% of the market is SVM and Move together, and 95% is EVM all the time, over a ten-year time horizon,” he says. “That just never happened.”
No time yet to announce victory
Mumtaz says he sees the SVM in particular rising in popularity, with a wide range of developments taking place, including work from entities like Eclipse, Firedancer and even Visa.
Read more: Solana offers solutions to the banking industry’s “bizarre inefficiencies,” says Mumtaz
“These things creep up on you slowly, until one day you’ll say, ‘Wait a minute. There’s actually a lot of stuff going on here. What happened?'”
Mumtaz claims that the SVM and MoveVM are “objectively better pieces of technology than the EVM” and now, he says, “they are also gaining distribution via the modular proposition of blockchains.”
Read more: Eclipse takes a best of all worlds approach to solving the scalability trilemma
The market also tends to overlook the fact that ‘integrated’ chains such as Solana are still effectively modular in many ways, according to Mumtaz.
“They have different components and different core teams working on them internally. It’s just all integrated into one message bus,” he says. “It’s still modular. It’s just that they don’t outsource certain things.”
As has always been the case throughout the history of software, both integrated and modular-oriented approaches must face some trade-offs, he says. “Integrated technologies have shown a very high degree of success throughout history,” he says. “So I also have some modular stacks. So that means they both work.”
Mumtaz criticizes the narrative that layer 2s have already “won” as the chosen blockchain scaling solution. ‘What did they win? We have about five users in the chain,” he chuckles.
“I’m not sure it’s time to declare victory. Let’s just keep working on it.”
Mumtaz explains that a “weird irony” of Solana is that, as a global state machine, it is able to “support different use cases that are incompossible.”
“Maybe different communities will form within that, which can ultimately help you with modularity.” He gives the example of sovereign compression, a Solana innovation that grew out of concerns about the high cost of NFT coins.
He says the state compression technology is “a core part of the infrastructure that is actually written into the RPC specification itself.” Innovations like state compression can be quickly added to the chain because the system is more integrated, Mumtaz says. “The communication overhead is less.”
Mumtaz says some modular system proponents criticize SVM for its perceived inability to “innovate in parallel with different parts of the stack.”
“I know this isn’t the case,” he says, “Helius is an infrastructure company – and we work with other teams doing just that.”
