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EVM DeFi grew up under high gas costs and ~12-second blocks. Solana DeFi grew up under sub-cent fees and 400ms slots. Those two environments produced fundamentally different protocol shapes: AMMs are the dominant primitive on Ethereum because per-tx coordination is expensive, but order books work great on Solana because order placement and cancellation are cheap. Understanding which environment a primitive was designed for tells you why it makes the choices it does.
Quick comparison of the on-chain DeFi stack across chains.
Use these three in order. Each builds on the one before.
In one paragraph, explain why Solana has on-chain order book DEXs while Ethereum mostly uses AMMs.
Walk me through how Solana's account model enables atomic multi-DEX aggregation in a single transaction.
Given a 400ms block time and sub-cent fees, design a market-making strategy that wouldn't work on Ethereum L1 but works on Solana.
Domain EVM equivalent Solana equivalent
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DEX (spot) Uniswap V3 (AMM) Phoenix (order book) + Orca (AMM)
Lending Aave, Compound MarginFi, Solend, Kamino
Perpetuals dYdX v4, GMX, Hyperliquid Drift, Mango, Zeta
Stablecoin DAI (MakerDAO) UXD (defunct), no major native CDP
LST stETH, rETH mSOL, jitoSOL, bSOL
Aggregator 1inch, CowSwap Jupiter
Lending automation Yearn, Beefy Kamino, Marinade
Why the divergence?
- Solana fees are <$0.01, so frequent on-chain orderbook updates are viable.
- Account model means contracts can read/modify many accounts atomically — Jupiter
can route across 20 DEXs in one tx.
- 400ms blocks mean liquidations on Solana are much faster than on Ethereum L1.
- Parallel execution (Sealevel) means independent trades can land in the same slot
without blocking each other.