The major chains compared, and what each actually trades off
Every chain makes the same three way trade off. Once you can see which corner a chain chose, its behaviour stops being mysterious.
The trade off every chain faces
The usual framing is the blockchain trilemma: decentralisation, security and scalability. You can have two comfortably. Pushing all three at once is where the engineering difficulty lives.
- Decentralisation: how many independent participants validate, and how cheap it is to be one. More participants means harder to capture and slower to agree.
- Security: how expensive it is to attack. Broadly proportional to the value committed to defending it.
- Scalability: transactions per second and cost per transaction. Higher throughput usually means heavier hardware, which means fewer people can run a node.
When a chain advertises enormous throughput and near zero fees, the honest question is which of the other two it traded, and the answer is usually node hardware requirements and therefore decentralisation.
The major chains, honestly
What actually decides which chain you use
In practice it is rarely the technology. It is these, in roughly this order.
- Where is the asset you want? If the token only exists on Solana, that decides it.
- Where is the liquidity? A cheaper chain with thin books can cost you more in slippage than an expensive chain with deep ones.
- What does a transaction cost relative to your size? Moving 50 dollars on Ethereum mainnet is wasteful. Moving 500,000 there is sensible.
- How will you get money in and out? Some chains have far better exchange support than others.
- What are you willing to trust? A single sequencer, a small validator set, a young bridge.
A practical default
For most people: hold long term on Bitcoin or Ethereum mainnet, do routine activity on an established rollup such as Base or Arbitrum, and use Solana if you are active in its ecosystem. Everything else should be a deliberate decision with a reason, not somewhere you ended up because a bridge suggested it.
BEFORE YOU MOVE ON
Common questions
What is the blockchain trilemma?
The observation that decentralisation, security and scalability trade against each other. A chain advertising enormous throughput and near zero fees has usually traded decentralisation, typically through heavy validator hardware requirements.
Which blockchain should I use?
Usually wherever the asset and the liquidity are. Hold long term on Bitcoin or Ethereum, do routine activity on an established rollup, and treat anything else as a deliberate choice.
Is Solana better than Ethereum?
They optimised for different things. Solana is far faster and cheaper with heavier validator requirements and a history of outages. Ethereum is more decentralised and battle tested with higher mainnet costs, scaling through rollups instead.
Risk warning: crypto is highly volatile and largely unregulated. You can lose everything you put in. Nothing here is financial, investment or tax advice.