The co-founder of Ethereum talks about the economy of the rapidly growing Solana blockchain

The co-founder of Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, has questioned the sustainability of competing projects, including the rapidly growing Solana blockchain, because risk capital flows into a number of new cryptocurrency networks.

Ethereum blockchain has developed into one of the most frequently used digital ledger, but faces challenges of competitors such as Solana who have set lower transaction fees to attract users.

lubin told the Financial Times that Solana, which presents itself as a faster and cheaper alternative to Ethereum, pays excessive rewards to users that validate the transactions in the network, compared with the income generated by these transactions.

Solana "has to find a more sustainable business model for the network," said Lubin.

"That is natural," he said. "All projects in our ecosystem essentially pretend until they do or die."

The rapidly growing blockchain project was confronted with doubts earlier. Some critics have argued that Solana has sacrificed security for more efficiency and the network has experienced several significant failures.

In response to Lubin's criticism, Solana said that "the mere consideration of the protocol revenue does not tell the whole history of the long -term performance" of the economic model of a blockchain.

lubin's comments came as a tech investor made large bets on new projects that try to create more efficient alternatives to Ethereum-including avalanches, Near Protocol and Solana-in a race to benefit from the growing mainstream interest in cryptocurrency applications.

Consensys, a software company for cryptocurrencies led by Lubin and closely associated with Ethereum, announced on Tuesday that it had more than doubled its rating in a new funding round from $ 450 million to $ 7 billion. The company has gained value when an influx of new users turned to its products to navigate in Ethereum.

Ethereum is the most widespread digital ledger for rapidly growing areas such as decentralized finances and non -fungible tokens. Lubin has become one of the project's loudest supporters on Wall Street after participating in the development of the network.

METAMASK, an app developed by Consensys with more than 30 million monthly users, has recorded almost $ 330 million of transaction fees by a function since the end of 2020, with which users can switch between cryptocurrency token to Ethereum.

Risk capital providers invested the new money in Consensys software, a company that Lubin founded with the help of JPMorgan during a restructuring that was completed in 2021.

It comes after almost three dozen former employees of the predecessor company Consensys AG registered in Switzerland recently contested the legality of the restructuring and applied for a special test. The employees claimed that the deal undervested intellectual property behind Metamask and other key products that were transferred to the new company.

lubin said that Consensys was "extremely open" as far as the negotiations with the former employees were concerned and "understood their concerns", and the company's products were effectively "before monetization" at the time of the transaction.

"It is a completely different world in our ecosystem when we cross the gap to the mainstream adoption than it was in the darkest moments of Covid," said Lubin.

Parafi Capital, a cryptocurrency venture company supported by KKR, led the new Consensys financing round. Microsoft, Temasek from Singapore and the second Vision Fund from Softbank also invested.

Consensys refused to comment on whether lubin or other shareholders sold shares in the financing.