A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

ETH's tactical problem is the L2 free market. It is a great approach from the perspective of finding the right technical solution and remaining decentralized, but the externalities eat away at the user experience, which is  equally if not more important. 

There is simply no way for a normal user to understand what they are getting into with layers, chains, 7702 wallets, evm compatibility and bridges. 

There is a light at the end of the tunnel if we make blobs bigger, introduce account + chain abstraction, native rollups etc, but this is a massively complex roadmap and will take years to realize. 

In that time, Solana just works (tm) and is eating ETHs lunch.

From an EVM builder's perspective Solana sucks. 

I spent days porting concealmint.com to Solana, and by EVM standards it's dead simple:

- Basic 721 contract, anyone can mint, token URI passed in at time of mint
- Client accepts information to build a token URI and mints the NFT
- Ponder indexer allows me to quickly query mints and owners 

Porting a perpetual mint like this to Solana was AWFUL. The system and tools in place assume you're going to follow a cookie cutter path of minting one big collection at once. Trying to create an initial collection and mint into it perpetually throws tons of errors. Indexing is built into the RPCs and it SUCKS. I have to wait at least 5-10 seconds for a mint to show up and get a URI to get data back. When I launched the app on mainnet I had to SEND AN EMAIL to Blowfish in order for the app to not get flagged by Phantom.

If you just want tokens, Solana is fine. Outside of that the creativity is limited with heavy centralized walls.

DX Engineer | Head of Developer Relations at /pinata | Building orbiter.host | stevedylan.dev/links

i learned enough solana dev to hate it last year, the tooling is bad and the paradigms are inconvenient and basically any usecase except launching a token is 100x harder to conceptualize and implement