Solana and Base clash again after playing nice for a little while

The perpetual superiority debate between the Base and Solana communities, which often ignores how one is an L2 and the other is an L1, just got a new iteration. 

Both chains are great and have their different strengths, but this has not stopped their communities from clashing on various topics and at different points over the years. 

The latest clash has some of the biggest players on both sides sharing their opinions, biased as they may be.

base will be be 2x faster than solana https://t.co/zU61459vke

— jesse.base.eth (@jessepollak) February 28, 2025

What caused the clash? 

The latest clash between the communities happened after flashblocks were revealed on Base. Flashblocks, which were built by Flashbots, are sub-blocks issued by the block builder and streamed to nodes every 200ms, enabling early confirmation times with native revert protection. 

According to a tweet from @Buildonbase, flashblocks will reportedly make Base 10x faster, which will make it the “fastest EVM chain to date,” reducing effective block times from 2 seconds down to 200 milliseconds. 

They’re still being tested, but according to the tweet, they are coming to mainnet in Q2. The announcement is a net positive for Base, and it got the community excited enough to throw shade at Solana. 

That shade came from Jesse Pollak, the network’s founder and a vocal Base voice. He quoted the tweet about flashblocks with a post claiming Base would soon be two times faster than Solana. 

It did not take long for Solana fans to assemble in the comments section armed with virtual pitchforks and ready to do battle. However, even though many of them made their presence known in the comments, they all seemed to be waiting for one person to arrive, and some even tagged him.

The person in question is none other than Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius Labs, Solana’s Leading RPC and API platform. 

Solana’s fiercest defender steps up 

Before Mert addressed Pollak’s statement, he first educated one ETH maxi after they claimed Solana’s relevance was overrated. 

“Arbitrum is faster than Solana; it always has been. 0.25s block time, almost twice as fast as Solana. Tps is slightly lower, but that only matters if enough transactions can fill it, which we’re far from.” 

The user adds that Arbitrum is doing all these while using Ethereum’s DA and demanded to know why no one is talking about it and why people are still using Solana. 

Mert replied with receipts. He highlighted how Solana does at least 20x that scale at much “cheaper median fees and 1500 more machines in a fully trustless and censorship-resistant manner.” 

some facts: solana does at least 20x the scale at much cheaper median fees and 1500 more machines in a fully trustless and censorship-resistant manner

anyone who conflates L2 blocks with L1 blocks is an unserious person

(not even gonna mention that arbitrum fees spiked to…

— mert | helius.dev (@0xMert_) February 28, 2025

In the next line, Mert pointed out that L2 blocks and L1 blocks are not to be confused. He then reminded the public that Arbitrum, which is being praised, saw transaction fees spike to 50-100$ during a regular airdrop at below 100 TPS not even one month ago. Meanwhile, Solana easily pulls off 2k TPS at $0.001. 

Mert also revealed that 250ms “latency” can be achieved on Solana by using shreds, and soon that number will fall to 120ms. 

“Solana is doing 2k real TPS on contentious state with sub-cent fees on a multi-geo cluster of 1500+ machines as *an L1* with full censorship resistance,” Mert pointed out. 

“Aim higher,” he concluded his post. “The reason no one talks about it is because you made it up.” 

The post got several likes and comments from those who agreed with his analogy, but Mert was not done defending Solana for the day. A couple of hours later, he quote-tweeted Pollak’s hopeful statement about Base with his opinion. 

“I’ve slowed down on reply-guying slop like this because it feels like punching down now. You guys go scale your AWS servers owned by corpo multi sigs. We will focus on scaling blockchains,” he wrote. 

I've slowed down on reply-guying slop like this because it feels like punching down now

you guys go scale your AWS servers owned by corpo multisigs

we will focus on scaling blockchains https://t.co/JizlFC73f2

— mert | helius.dev (@0xMert_) February 28, 2025

“It is frankly embarrassing to be a centralized AWS server doing 20x less scale than Solana at higher fees while being a stage 0 rollup and having the full resources of the largest crypto company on earth,” Mert continued. 

He rounded up his commentary by pointing out that flashblocks is nothing new and that Base drew inspiration from Solana’s shreds to make it. In the end, Mert made an apparently sarcastic threat to rename shreds as blocks and “and we will be 20x faster than Base.”

Base and Solana have been at it for a while now

The rivalry between Solana and Base, in a general sense, is good news for the space as both sides continue to try to one-up each other on the basis of supremacy. It has led to some interesting clashes on X over the past few months, resulting in back-and-forths between characters like Mert and Pollak. 

Earlier this year, Mert called out the Base network, Coinbase team, and Jesse Pollak directly when USDC transactions on Coinbase faced delays of up to 21 hours during the peak of the TRUMP and MELANIA memecoin frenzy. 

The exchange ended with Mert saying, “As long as we agree to compete honestly without false virtue signaling and backroom tactics — I am on board with that. Best of luck, and let’s have some fun pushing crypto forward.” 

Others in the communities have chimed in from time to time. In one instance, Diego Perez de Ayala, co-founder and managing partner at Frictionless Capital and a Solana supporter, declared that it makes no sense to compare the networks, likening Solana to a “fighter jet” and Base to a “hang glider.” 

Diego Perez emphasized Solana’s parallel processing and high TPS with over 2,000 globally distributed nodes, comparing it to Base as an Optimism-based layer 2 with “low throughput” and “sequential execution” linked to Ethereum’s EVM limitations. 

Base defenders were livid about the comparison. In their counterattack, they claimed Solana sacrifices reliability for speed, citing past network outages, while Base benefits from Ethereum’s security.

Another time both parties clashed was when a Base maxi claimed it’s “often considered better than Solana” because of its ties to the Ethereum foundation, which makes it a more suitable platform for builders who want to work without worrying about outages or “rug pulls” associated with Solana’s meme-supportive ecosystem. 

Those who defended the SOL-issuing network then countered by highlighting how Base’s block times is 5x slower with a lower TPS. There was also talk about how their wallet ecosystem beats what Coinbase offers. Jesse Pollak was tapped to lead the Coinbase wallet team at the end of September 2024.

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