The truth behind the 58.7 billion stake: Why is the attack cost of Ethereum far greater than that of Solana?

Original author: 0x Todd, Partner at Nothing Research (X: @0x_Todd)

A few days ago, I saw a post that said: "Now the staking volume of Solana has surpassed that of ETH, does it mean that the security of the Solana chain has exceeded that of ETH?" This statement is so misleading that many people actually believe it.

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

The staking data for ETH is 34 million ETH, worth around 61 billion USD; the staking data for Sol is 388 million SOL, worth 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 hinder block creation, 51% can produce a new longest chain, and 67% can directly double spend. However, in terms of practical difficulty, attacking ETH is significantly more challenging than attacking Solana.

PS: Of course, assuming the success rate of attacking SOL is 0.001%, the difficulty of attacking ETH might 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 concentration (2) maturity of Staking infrastructure.

1. Node Centralization

Let's assume a scenario: there is a magical hacker who successfully hacks into the data centers of Amazon and mainstream cloud service providers using a 0-day vulnerability.

So, controlling Solana > 50% requires simultaneously obtaining the top 43 nodes. It's difficult, but not impossible.

For ETH, a single node can stake a maximum of 32 ETH, so it requires obtaining 1,187,000 nodes, which sounds like an impossible task.

Of course, this is unfair to Sol, because essentially ETH is also run by numerous node operators, and a single entity can own tens of thousands of nodes. So, based on the operators recorded on Rated so far...

You will find that all registered ETH node operators together account for only 47.5%, and they can't even reach the 50% threshold. It remains 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 and @Obol_Collective, have also done a lot of homework.

For example, Lido encourages nodes to use less of Amazon's data centers and more niche data centers. They suggest using less mainstream clients and supporting more niche clients. Additionally, Lido has also allocated 4% of ETH specifically for DVT infrastructure such as Obol and SSV.

As for Obol, it is DVT technology. You can think of it as your node being managed by a cluster collectively, rather than a single entity.

For example, if there are 4 people managing a node, you can require it to be a 3/4, so that once a node goes offline, the other nodes can immediately take over. If you set it to 10, then you can set it to 7/10, allowing for a maximum tolerance of three nodes going offline.

Note: On ETH and most PoS chains, going offline is also a form of [malicious behavior]. If 33% of the nodes go offline, the chain will become paralyzed.

Moreover, what makes Obol unique is that it implements clustering through a client, so your private keys (fragments) are not uploaded to the chain, which is more secure. This is achieved through DKG (which I can share about later when I have time).

Recently, Obol just launched its mainnet, and those interested can go mine a bit, just @ebunker_eth.

Therefore, infrastructure like Obol that is specifically prepared for Staking ETH is currently not available on Solana.

Of course, it's not about one being better than the other; both chains are very secure. However, despite the funding stakes being at the same level, in terms of security, ETH still has a slight edge due to node centralization and infrastructure maturity.

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