◎Why Solana?

Solana is uniquely positioned to bring on millions of new users and real world adoption

8 min readJan 9, 2022

Quick Overview

Solana is an ultrafast, low cost, censorship resistance, high performance blockchain with smart contract functionality using $SOL cryptocurrency. Solana’s network is a decentralized censorship-resistant built to enable scalable, user-friendly apps for the world. Powered by innovative technology, including novel mechanism called “proof of history.” Making it the fastest blockchain in the world with a rapidly growing ecosystem in crypto, with over 400 projects spanning DeFi, NFTs, Web3 and more. For a more in depth look into Solana network read here — Solana.

Key Features of Solana

Scalability (50K TPS/ subsecond global state finality)
Low cost (Avg txs fee is $0.0007)
Composability (High performance without layer 2s/sharding)
Top tier ecosystem partners
Decentralized and secure (1,374 global validators)

Solana has all the key ingredients needed to succeed

Talent: Brilliant and passionate builders are flocking to the open design space of crypto in record numbers. Solana has attracted some top tier talent and continues to bring on new people and partnerships.

Community: The rise of NFTs has helped foster many different cultures and well knit communities. Meet ups, merch, and online presence different than we have seen before. Giving away for strangers on the internet to network and work together towards a common goal, in a groups who’s members are verified and given exclusive access to events or items with the ability to contribute. NFT DAO’s are helping to further decentralize the network by starting their own validators like @MonkeyDAO, @ThugDAO, @DAADAO, GenesysGo allowing anyone to stake their $SOL.

Leadership: Anatoly Yakovenko and @rojgokal co founders of Solana lead with example, clarity, and longterm mindset. Solana was built from the ground up by a team with deep expertise in building high-performance distributed systems at scale (former Qualcomm, Intel, Netscape, and Google). The founding team has been working together 15 years+ and 4 of the 5 founders are iron man athletes.

Capital: We’ve seen mammoth venture capital fund raises, crypto startup fundraises, and staggering growth in emerging liquid protocols across Web3 use cases. Institutional interest is beginning to emerge.

Culture: Web3, NFTs, and decentralized cryptos are bringing on a wave of new cultures. Solana is at the heart of it.

Timing: Critical infrastructure was installed during the last bear market that made it easier than ever (socially and practically) to embrace this technol movement. Which is different than last bull market.

Follow the builders

Better developer experience with the use of Anchor which is a framework that makes building Solana applications easier by abstracting a lot of the heavy lifting. Smart contracts are written in Rust which is one of the most loved programming languages (4 years running on StackOverflow).

At Solana’s latest Breakpoint conference: $100 million in investment for decentralized social media with Reddit’s cofounder, $100 million fund with FTX geared towards blockchain gaming, Brave’s migration to Solana as the browser’s default blockchain, Solana’s ascendance as a potentially dominant platform in crypto gaming and NFTs (hello, FTX integration), and the recent 1mm wallet threshold for Solana’s browser wallet, Phantom.

IGNITION | A Global Solana Hackathon gave $5,120,000 in prizes and seed money with over 5861 participants in 2021.

“Skepticism in web3 is overestimation of the power of tech, and underestimation of the power of people armed with cryptography.” -Anatoly Yakovenko

NFTs are so many things. You can do anything with them, programable like a webpage. But on top of it you can have scarcity, ownership, allocation, and rights associated with it.

Smart contracts. I think it’s hard to overstate how important this was for the space: it’s what brought crypto to web3/metaverse/defi/etc. The programability of the tokens allows for multitude of different projects to spring up.

Don’t underestimate the power of composability and programmability

Web1 -> Web2 -> Web3 evolution as Read-Only -> Read-Write -> Read-Write-Own. -Eshita

We have flipped applications from closed code, corporations own the platform and users are the data. To open code where contributors own the platform. Users own their data. Digital private keys now enable digital private property.

Tokens in Web3 provide mechanism that gives value and control back to the users and builders. Rather than funneling through top down central control or company.

Continuous innovation of NFTs utility use cases shows the potential to be much more than just a jpeg. With unique ownership, exclusivity, passive income, royalties, gambling, IDO’s, metaverse characters, access passes, staking for coin rewards, the innovation is just getting started.

You can’t right click and save the culture.

“The internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens.” -Chris Dixon

User friendly, easy to use, fast and cheap

We often forget that Solana network that has amassed a $65bn+ market cap launched only a few years ago. Phantom wallet has amassed 1.8 million new users in the last eight months of 2021 with no signs of slowing in 2022. With over $16B SOL staked. Magic Eden has enabled a marketplace that is easy and fun for users. With 7.5 million transactions in 2021 — remember the first NFT on Solana didn't launch until March 2021 and there is already so much demand. This will likely continue with the upcoming release of mobile wallet.

Scalability

Solana allows for people to build apps that can scale. Provides a network for executing smart contracts and building decentralized applications with rapid transaction speeds and low fees for both developers and users. Alot of these companies on the Solana network are growing to become reputable well established companies. This growth will continue and help fortify the overall ecosystem. Data already suggests Solana is the most performant blockchain amongst the leading smart-contract platforms and Layer 2 solutions.

Solana Ecosystem is Booming

Infrastructure, Marketplaces, Games, Dapps, DEX, Lending, Metaverse, gambling, staking, RPC Servers, Data Storage, Bridging, wallets. Everything is in place for the longterm success and scalability. There is huge potential to build out a new class of decentralized applications that can only be made possible by a high-performance scalable blockchain.

Key partnerships led by FTX Research launched Serum, which is a non-custodial decentralized exchange that’s built on the Solana blockchain. The average daily volume is $80 million, and Serum’s total transactions have exceeded $4.3 billion. USDC, the largest stablecoin ecosystem in the world, chose Solana for fast settlement. Metaplex empowers creators to engage audiences via NFTs, storefronts, and low-cost minting, is also run on the Solana blockchain.

OpenSea launched in December 2017, marking the first open marketplace for any non-fungible token on the Ethereum blockchain. The true marketplace pioneer that kickstarted the NFT bull run with projects like cryptopunks, bored ape yaucht club, cool cats, and many others. Today it is the largest marketplace.

Magic Eden’s launch on September 2021 the 24-hour trading volume hit a high of over 50,000 SOL, i.e. $7.5 million. The website has over 200,000 visitors each day. Currently the third largest market place.

The first NFT minted on Solana was Kreechures. Minting in March 2021. But it wasn’t until Solana Monkey Business launched in August 2021 that the NFT craze exploded on Solana. Right in-line with the Ethereum NFT hype. As the space continues to mature, more established projects will continue to build larger brands and community statues. Many new utilities and use cases will also be born as new projects arise.

Future Plans for Solana to Become Carbon Neutral

As a proof of stake network, the security of the network is not dependent on energy usage. On Solana, there is no need for energy-intensive mining, meaning the network is extremely environmentally efficient.

with 1,374 validator nodes and an estimated 20,000,000,000 transactions — uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households.

Bitcoin = 197,090,000,000 kWh per year
Ethereum = 91,390,000,000 kWh per year
Solana = 11,051,066 kWh per year

Layer 1 competition is fierce

Solana has grown so fast there’s bound to be growing pains and challenges along the way. This includes competition from the many other blockchains that aim to provide similar networks. Solana is the only blockchain protocol that can scale to 10s of millions of users if not billion of users one day. The network is really good at the things Ethereum doesn’t even try to be good at. No fragmented Layer 2 systems or sharded chains. Solana ensures composability between ecosystem projects by maintaining a single global state as the network scales.

Market Cap of other Layer 1 projects:

Solana ($60 billion) / Polkadot ($40 billion) / Avalanche ($30 billion)

Terra ($16 billion) / Polygon ($12 billion) / Algorand ($11 billion)

Near ($9B) / Cosmos ($7 billion) / Fantom($6.3B) Harmony ($3.7B)

Kadena ($1.5B) / Rose ($1.3B)

Current layer 1 blockchain usage, in transactions per second:

Dogecoin: 0.23

Polkadot: 0.51

Litecoin: 0.52

Cardano: 1.38

Ethereum: 3.00

Tezos: 3.31

Bitcoin: 5.43

Avax (X+C): 7.79

Ripple: 17.88

Stellar: 70.06

*Solana: 1,833.00

Web 3 and Crypto is coming for mainstream adoption

Solana’s ecosystem is set up perfectly to bring on waves of new users. With easy and user friendly applications that make it fun and beneficial to use. Other than Solana, all blockchains are single-threaded processors. That is, they can only make one state update at a time. Moore’s Law will help the Solana network become increasingly decentralized as hardware costs decrease on a per transistor-chip basis, thereby increasing accessibility of running a node. Solana is uniquely positioned to gain market share from existing smart contract blockchains as well as attract new projects and users to the crypto/blockchain space.

Solana meets the performance needs of a global blockchain that is decentralized and composable. Proving open permissionless system for data to flow. Traveling as fast as news travels, creating information symetry and maximizing real time censorship resistance. A bet on Solana is a bet that one day we will need fully decentralized systems that can support millions of users, thousands of transactions per second, and can continue to support scalability and significant value securely.