Optimism (OP) Finally Flips Solana (SOL), but There’s Caveat

ConsenSys veteran Evan van Ness, author of the Week in Ethereum newsletter, noticed an interesting “flippening” and explained why the recent bullish rally might have been the last one for Solana (SOL).

Optimism (OP) exceeds Solana (SOL) by fully diluted valuation

Evan van Ness shared the statistics of the dramatic “flippening”: Ethereum’s (ETH) second-layer scaling solution Optimism (OP) exceeded Solana (SOL) by fully diluted market valuation (FDV).

$OP just flipped $SOL

One is a leading execution environment for the world’s settlement layer.

The other is a ill-performant web2 database. pic.twitter.com/WSdkXxXZJG

— Evan Van Ness (@evan_van_ness) February 3, 2023

Fully diluted valuation (also fully diluted market capitalization) is a metric that displays the market cap of a project once all its tokens have been released into circulation. Thus, market cap is always less or equal to FDV.

By printing time, Optimism (OP) has only 5% of its tokens released into the circulating supply: as such, its market cap is sitting at $664 million, while the FDV targets $13.3 billion.

Solana (SOL) sees its FDV at $13.2 billion, while its market capitalization is over $9.1 billion; SOL, therefore, is the 12th largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Optimism’s OP holds the 76th position in this ranking.

Also, Evan van Ness noticed that another “Ethereum killer” Avalanche (AVAX) is well beyond both Solana (SOL) and Optimism (OP) with its FDV over $15.3 billion.

Is Optimism (OP) more centralized than Solana (SOL)?

He slammed Solana (SOL) and Avalanche (AVAX) as an “ill-performant Web2 database” and a “Go Ethereum (geth) fork (…) with big blocks and sidechains,” respectively.

Pseudonymous DeFi and NFT expert Foobar (@0xfoobar on Twitter) opined that Optimism (OP) is more centralized than Solana (SOL) so far. Evan van Ness responded that Optimism (OP) is only attempting to retain Ethereum’s (ETH) level of security while Solana (SOL) is centralized by design.

As covered by U.Today yesterday, Optimism (OP) is getting closer to Bedrock, an upgrade that, if passed, might advance its throughput and interoperability with Ethereum (ETH).

Optimism (OP) continues to increase its share in net TVL of all Ethereum’s L2 ecosystems: today, Feb. 4, it surpassed 33%, L2Beat data says.