Solana bear market unity developer posture: Compatible with EVM to attract new developers

Written by: David

On July 19, a message was released on Solana’s official blog: Developers can now also use the Solidity language to develop on Solana.

This also means that developers who have written applications for Ethereum and EVM before can also do the same thing on Solana with ease.

According to its blog, the way to achieve this development capability migration is Solang - a Solidity compiler that allows developers to write Solana programs using the Solidity programming language.

At the same time, a few days ago, Solana’s EVM compatible solution Neon has been launched on the Solana mainnet, completing the necessary tools for Ethereum developers to transition their projects to Solana, allowing developers to write Ethereum applications on Solana.

Prior to this, the development of Solana was mainly based on writing smart contracts using Rust or C. Now it also supports Solidity and cuts the cake of Ethereum’s original developer ecology. This purpose is becoming more and more obvious.

From the “explosive God of War” in the competition stage of the new public chain, to the “slump” after the FTX black swan incident; to the subsequent development of mobile phones, reconstruction of the ecology, and the expansion of the current development language… Solana does not seem to be lying down in the bear market cycle, but is doing its best to lay dormant and foreshadowing.

It’s just that this kind of dormancy is more on the supply side, which is not intuitive for end users.

Whether it is a mobile phone or a public chain, in the final analysis, it requires a massive supply of software and application layers: more applications can enrich the ecology and increase the use scenarios of users for hardware and chains.

How to make more software and applications? The answer may be to unite all forces that can be united. In a bear market, this solidarity strategy is even more obvious. Supporting Solidity development is tantamount to showing favor to Ethereum developers. You can develop on Ethereum, and now you can also develop on Solana. There is no need to be hindered by the development language.

A bear market builds, and a bull market breaks out. In this process, the developer wins the world.

Solang’s support for Solidity and EVM is just a phenomenon. Perhaps we can think more deeply from the development side to see what the essence of public chains like Solana needs to touch in order to re-emerge.

“Father” ecology, a good choice for uniting developers

Whether it is Solana or other public chains, if you want to expand the dApps in a larger ecology, in addition to the actions we can perceive in marketing and publicity, you also need to attract developers as much as possible behind the scenes.

As general users, we are actually very vague about “public chain development”: what should be developed? When will it be developed? Who will develop it? These things don’t seem to have much to do with us.

But in fact, how to attract developers correctly is actually closely related to us. The degree of activity of different developers on the public chain directly determines the number and quality of applications on the chain, and also indirectly affects various short-term benefits of public chain tokens (such as a new development project requiring token lock pledge or IEO) and long-term trends (such as ETH’s technical upgrade).

If we take a look at it, the public chain and related ecology attract developers, which can actually be divided into the following levels:

• Protocol layer: Let developers develop around the protocol itself
• Community layer: Let developers develop related applications around the community of the protocol, such as tools, documents, wallets or other projects;
• Parent ecosystem layer: Allow developers to integrate into a wider ecosystem and provide shared capabilities at the base layer

Among them, the parent ecological layer is the key to expanding the source of developers. Only by grasping this larger circle can more users be attracted. If it is not easy to understand, we can use OP’s L2 as an example:

• Protocol layer: developers who develop the OP protocol;
• Community layer: developers of other applications on the OP ecosystem, such as Defi protocols such as Velodrome and Lyra;
• Parent ecological layer: developers on Ethereum. The OP’s ecology is actually parasitic on the Ethereum ecology.

This means that the OP can naturally “recognize Ethereum as the father”, and allow the original Ethereum developers to easily develop applications on L2 under low-friction development conditions.

In the current state of the entire encryption market, Ethereum is indeed the only true father, with unrivaled popularity and influence. If you can successfully take over the developer resources on the parent ecology, it will of course be of great benefit to the development of your own chain.

It’s just that L2 such as OP and ARB can seamlessly inherit because of the “blood relationship” with L1, while non-EVM-compatible public chains such as Solana need to change their own technical characteristics if they want to inherit developer resources in the parent ecosystem.

So we saw Solana’s Solang and Neon EVM mentioned at the beginning of the article, both to be able to undertake the technical changes of Ethereum developer resources.

Note that the author believes that “recognizing Ethereum as the father” is not a derogatory act, but a good measure to keep warm in a bear market. Crypto’s circle is very small, and it is a natural choice to reuse technical capabilities and resources; it is not shabby to be able to attract other developers to transfuse their own ecology.

Instead of competing head-on, it is better to unite all forces that can be united and survive.

Solana Developers Surge, But Competition Still Needs

If the above description of Solana’s strategy to attract developers still seems unintuitive, let’s take a look at the more obvious data.

According to the 2022 Electric Capital Developer Report, Ethereum has the largest developer ecosystem, and the total number of developers is 2.8 times that of the second place.

At the same time, compared with itself, Ethereum will add nearly 15,000 new developers in 2022, the largest increase in history.

Developers have no so-called exclusivity in nature. They can develop on Ethereum or on other public chains. It is nothing more than a trade-off of factors such as incentives, migration costs, and technical barriers. Therefore, the massive resources of Ethereum at the development level will naturally arouse the interest of other public chains or L2.

Turning our attention to the new public chain, we can find that Solana is catching up: Among the public chains with more than 1,000 new developers last year, Solana is gaining momentum, and the number of developers has increased by 83% year-on-year, which is the largest increase among all public chains. In comparison, Polygon’s developer count grew by 40%, Cosmos by 25%, and Polkadot by 2%.

Solana co-founder Raj Gokal said in an interview with TechCrunch: “Developers will build where they see technical advantages. Solana offers faster transactions and lower costs than alternatives; but they will also build where they see other advantages, such as an active community.”

Now, there seems to be one more reason for Build - it is compatible with the off-the-shelf EVM and Solidity languages, and it is easier to get started.

But at the same time, don’t forget that there are also competitors, such as Polygon.

From the developer’s “newness” point of view, Solidity is a high-level programming language compiled into EVM bytecode. However, Solidity has a steep learning curve, and building secure smart contracts can be difficult for inexperienced programmers.

Therefore, Solana chose to use languages more familiar to traditional programmers such as Rust and C for development. This approach certainly has the benefit of attracting newcomers, but don’t forget that Polygon also supports the common Golang as a programming language;

In the competition for Web3 stock developers, Polygon naturally supports Solidity and EVM, which puts a lot of pressure on Solana, and I think it is also an important incentive for Solana to support EVM and Solang this time.

（图源：Solana Vs. Polygon Vs. Ethereum – The Ultimate Comparison，Blockchain Council)

Additionally, both Solana and Polygon offer considerable developer tool support, such as Solana Studio and Truffle Suite. These tools simplify the development process, including debugging, deployment, and testing, making it easier for developers to build and deploy decentralized applications on their respective platforms.

On the whole, although Rust and C languages are more conducive to web2 developers, in order to compete with other EVM public chains, Solana also needs to use Solidity to capture more Web3 developers.

In order to break through the public chain competition, in the current pattern of one super and many strong, “strong” is also an inevitable competitive choice in terms of development smoothness.

Summarize

From the blossoming of public chains to the great harmony of the world that is gradually moving closer to EVM, we don’t need to accuse anyone of betraying their original intentions, or criticize who dare not confront Ethereum.

The encryption circle is very small, and the stocks on the supply side and the demand side are so fixed. The bear market cycle cannot bring incremental growth. Instead, revitalizing and reusing the stock is a correct posture.

On the supply side, it is better to revitalize the existing stock developers than on the demand side, trying to cut the leeks of users.

Unite the vital forces and wait for the arrival of the next cycle.