Ethereum L2 language Cairo’s TVL surpasses Solana’s Rust

Programming language compiler Cairo is now the third largest smart contract language by total value locked (TVL), according to DeFiLlama data.

As of Dec. 26, Cairo has a TVL of $418.23 million. In comparison, the programming language of layer1 blockchain networks like Solana’s (SOL) Rust has a TVL of $396.22 million, while Cardano’s (ADA) Haskell TVL is $53.27 million.

Solana’s Rust decline

A year ago, Solana’s Rust had a TVL of around $12 billion, coinciding with when the Layer-1 network was viewed as a major competitor to Ethereum.

Since then, the network has had to battle a series of outages, and its connection to Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire birthed a cloud around the project.

According to DeFiLlama data, Solana has a TVL of $214.92 million, behind other blockchain networks like Avalanche (AVAX), Polygon (MATIC), Cronos (CRO), etc.

Meanwhile, the native token of the ecosystem SOL is down more than 90% in 2022. It is currently trading at $11.20, with several analysts predicting that the asset’s value will go to zero.

Besides that, popular Solana NFT projects like y00ts and DeGods announced they would bridge to Polygon and Ethereum in 2023.

Crypto YouTuber Brian Armstrong (BitBoy), while describing Solana’s situation, said:

“A coin being down 90%+ is not a death sentence. However, Solana has also lost a whopping 90% of its developers. And 100% of its momentum.”

Ethereum-related languages dominate

Meanwhile, the dominant smart contract language is Ethereum’s Solidity, with a TVL of $50.4 billion. Christian Reitwiessner, Alex Beregszaszi, and several former Ethereum core contributors developed the language.

Vyper is the second-largest smart contract language, with a TVL of $3.98 billion. The programing language is also used to develop smart contracts compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM).

Cairo was created in 2020 but became popular in 2022 with the growth of StarkNet’s Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup ecosystem — a Layer-2 network running on Ethereum. Several protocols like decentralized exchange dYdX, ImmutableX, and dapps like Celer, Canvas, and Sorare run on the network.

The above suggests that the top three programming languages by TVL are related to the Ethereum network.