In a casual conversation between Cardano community members and Solana community members, it appears that both parties are eyeing the possibility of Solana becoming a Cardano sidechain.
Taking into Twitter, one user from the Cardano community opened the floor for Cardano community members to vote on whether or not they would love to see Solana become a side chain to Cardano, and the results showed that 80% of voters were on board with the move.
Can Solana become a secondary blockchain to Cardano?
Charles Hoskinson, who got hold of the tweet, left a casual response via a meme, suggesting that although he may not have any serious plans to partner with Solana on its network being a sidechain to Cardano, he seems to be welcoming of the suggestions from community members.
A sidechain typically connects to another blockchain network. The latter, which is the parent network, is merged with the sidechain through two-way pegging.
Adam Back, the founder of Hashcash, birthed the first concept of a sidechain back in 2014, which was intended to combat Bitcoin’s scalability issue.
In the academic paper documenting the new concept, the authors noted;
“We propose a new technology, pegged sidechains, which enables bitcoins and other ledger assets to be transferred between multiple blockchains. This gives users access to new and innovative cryptocurrency systems using the assets they already own.”
Although some community members seemed optimistic, Solana might not be possible to integrate with Cardano, as both networks are objectively incapable of integrating due to the difference in network structure.
Both networks, however, seem to have had a notable run this year. Recently Cardano recorded a significant milestone, as smart contracts on the network surpassed 4,000. This comes after the network added smart contract functionality back in September 2021. Additionally, Cardano has seen new staking addresses jump by over 20,000 within 13 months.
On the other hand, Solana has recorded massive growth in the NFT sector. Back in November, data from Messari showed that the platform saw a 19.3% QoQ growth after securing 8 million daily new NFTs.