Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin showed sympathy for competitor Solana (SOL) in a Dec. 30 tweet. He said that “smart people” told him that Solana had “a serious intelligent developer community” and suggested that the opportunists involved with the project in the past had been “washed out”.
Buterin also expressed hope that the Solana community “gets its fair chance to thrive.”
Some smart people tell me that there is a serious smart developer community in Solana, and now that the terrible money opportunistic people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future.
Hard to tell from the outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to develop
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 29, 2022
SOL’s price has fallen over 90% since its peak, partly due to the coin’s association with the failed FTX exchange. But Solana developers have argued that the collapse of FTX did not harm the network itself.
Vitalik’s praise for Solana impressed many in the crypto Twitter community. Ari Paul of BlockTower Capital produced a tweet thread arguing that more crypto companies should follow Vitalik’s example, as he explained: “This is how someone who likes to ‘compete’ for earnings and think in positive terms behaves. A fun test you can give anyone about almost anything (service providers, fund managers, developers, you name it)[…]Ask them about the competition in a positive way.”
Not everyone was happy with Buterin’s testimony, however. Former poker pro Mike McDonald saw the statement as a “sign of virtue”.
Normally I love Vitalik, but that just seems like an infantilizing virtue signal to me. For example, does he think Solana developers haven’t heard of Ethereum?
— Mike McDonald (@MikeMcDonald89) December 29, 2022
Some critics also found the timing of Buterin’s tweet suspicious. Would he have praised Solana if it was still going well?
That’s like Lebron playing 1v1 against a random high schooler and then saying some nice things when Lebron wins 11-0 and the kid blows out his ACL.
— Kyle Decentral (@KyleLogiks) December 30, 2022
Solana was once dubbed the “Ethereum killer,” partly due to its high scalability. But it has also been criticized by some for being overly centralized and unstable.