It’s easy to forget, but there was once a time when every up-and-coming smart contract network was compared to Ethereum. Five years ago, the talk was of anointing “Ethereum killers” with Solana one of many such contenders. They don’t make those comparisons any more – in fact it’s more common for aspiring blockchains to be compared to Solana.
While Solana always possessed the technology to make it a dominant network – its throughput alone of around 65,000 transactions per second puts Ethereum’s double-digit capacity in the shade – its rise owes more to the ancillary features that transform a blockchain into a veritable ecosystem: tooling, infrastructure support, passionate communities, and genuine use cases. These attributes take years to develop, but once in place, they aren’t easily lost. Solana today is streets ahead of the Solana of two years ago – and it’s only going to get better.
What’s Solana Good For?
During the last bull market, when Solana came of age, it found product-market fit for two primary activities: memecoins and NFTs. Let’s call it entertainment. Its throughput and ultra-low fees made it ideally suited to hosting “degen” activity at scale. During the current cycle, it remains the epicenter of these core web3 verticals – indeed its grip on the memecoin economy has strengthened thanks to the rise of pump.fun and the no-code token launchpad format it’s popularized.
But there’s also a lot more that can be done on Solana now, whose network also now accounts for a significant proportion of all “serious” onchain business, from DeFi to staking. While Solana still attracts degen traders in their millions, it’s also a home to pro trading firms and even institutions who appreciate its speed and reliability now that the former stability issues have been smoothed out.
The State of Solana Today
As an examination of the leading Solana projects shows, there’s a lot you can do within its ecosystem today. And with each new project that comes onstream, the potential use cases and ways to use digital assets to make money, earn yield, or simply have fun on Solana are increased.
One of the clearest signs that Solana has come of age is in the quality of projects offering solutions that extend the capabilities of those offered by incumbent Solana protocols. In other words, they’re not just launching another DEX or NFT marketplace, but are rather complementing existing services and providing new ways to access their core services. Take Orbitt for example, which has found its niche in using AI to enhance trading experiences on Solana.
Its Orbitt PRO web extension provides human readable answers to questions concerning chart analysis and market sentiment, while its market making service enables Solana projects – including pump.fun tokens – to increase volume and get noticed. Like many of the projects innovating on Solana, Orbitt is invested in the network’s long-term success – unsurprisingly it’s in the process of becoming a Solana validator, providing a way to play a more direct role in strengthening its ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Xandeum is on a mission to further scale Solana through provisioning virtually unlimited off-chain storage, allowing Solana dapps to access exabytes of data without compromising decentralization. And, as further evidence of a flourishing ecosystem, Solana is spawning its own layer-2s including Sonic, whose gaming L2 is the first rollup to be deployed, further easing the burden on the main chain.
Slowly Then All at Once
In their early stages, blockchains tend to be incubated in a top-down format, with a foundation tasked with the network’s growth leading grant programs, hackathons, and administering ecosystem funds. But for a handful of blockchains that reach critical mass, there comes a point when those stabilizers are no longer required. A point when innovation occurs organically and developers start building not because they’re paid to but because, after examining all the options, they’re convinced that this is the best place to be.
Solana isn’t the last word in blockchain design; other networks will emerge and the fortunes of established ones will rise and fall. Its enduring success will depend on its ability to continue scaling, improving network stability, and further decentralizing its validator base. But this much is clear: Solana is no longer a one-trick pony. Nor is it just another network: it’s now at the very center of web3 and the standard by which other networks are appraised. Once the plucky contender, it’s now the king of the ring.
