The crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried says solana is better than ethereum, as it's one of the few networks able to handle mass adoption

• Bankman-Fried said solana is one of the few blockchains with a road map to millions of transactions.
• Not many blockchains, including ethereum, are focused on scale, he said at a conference Tuesday.
• Bitcoin sometimes comes under fire for not being able to accommodate many real-use cases.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the 29-year-old who heads the FTX exchange, said he believes solana is better than ethereum, as it's one of the few blockchains with a plan to accommodate mass adoption.

Bankman-Fried has a net worth of $22.5 billion thanks to his crypto business, which makes him the youngest person to enter the Forbes 400 after Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.

He spoke at Yahoo Finance and Decrypt's Crypto Goes Mainstream conference on Tuesday about how the biggest upside of the solana network is its ability to handle an enormous number of users and transactions.

Solana is a decentralized-finance peer-to-peer network that many have billed as an "ethereum killer" based on its quicker transaction speed and lower fees when compared to its larger rival.

The network can run 60,000 transactions per second at $0.0015 per transaction, while ethereum handles just 17,000 at an average cost of $5.80 each.

"Solana is one of the few currently existing public blockchains that has a really plausible road map to scale millions of transactions per second at, you know, fractions of a penny per transaction, which is a scale that you need for this," Bankman-Fried said.

"That is not where a lot of other blockchains have been focusing, including ethereum."

Solana launched in April 2020, and its token has risen by almost 16,000% so far this year. It's now the fifth biggest cryptocurrency by market value, with a capitalization of $73 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

Ether, the native token of the ethereum network, launched in 2015 and so has had a bit of a hea -start relative to other DeFi tokens. The network gives users the option to build applications over it such as nonfungible tokens, send payments and execute smart contracts, among others. It's risen by over 500% to record highs close to $5,000 this year, as users have flocked to the network.

Bankman-Fried said that a mass application business would need to be able to accommodate hundreds of millions to billions of users and transactions per second.

"That millions of transactions per second is really a requirement of any mass-scale system," Bankman-Fried said.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, is the most traded cryptocurrency and is gradually entering the financial mainstream. But its network for now doesn't offer the same flexibility and scalability of, say, ethereum. And transactions are a lot slower and more expensive, while its carbon footprint has been a source of concern for climate-conscious investors.