The battle of the Temple of Priests is Solana’s past. It has been good, bad, and parted with FTX. Relying on high performance, DePIN, DeFi, and Ethereum alternatives, Solana is back again!

In the entire L0/L1/L2 public chain competition, Solana is second only to Ethereum. In all the tracks we can think of, Solana has scored more than 90 points, except for ZK and L2. However, according to founder Anatoly, "Solana itself is a super-fast and super-secure public chain, and there is no need to continue to build on it. It is enough to develop based on the Solana mainnet."

Let’s count Solana’s achievements:

• DeFi: marginfi/Jito/Pyth Network

• NFT: Magic Eden/Mad Lads

• DePIN：Helium/Render Network

• Payment: Visa/USDC

• RWA: Maple Finance

• GameFi: Star Atla

• Hardware & Meme: Sage & Bonk

• Inscription: Nos-20 (Neon)

• Wallet: Backpack/Atomic Wallet/Exodus/Phantom Wallet

Solana not only has old brands such as Magic Eden and Render Network, but also new forces such as Jito and Bonk, and even Helium, a product that has become popular again.

Among the many projects that experienced the FTX shock, Solana not only survived, but also got better and better. In December 2022, the price of SOL fell to around US$10, less than 4% of the highest point of US$250. It has now risen to US$70, which is equivalent to recovering one-third of the price.

Solana’s exclusive secrets for extreme performance

The author has created the second most complete ecosystem in the crypto world, and there are signs that it is vaguely surpassing the EVM ecosystem. This is my personal subjective opinion of Solana. This impression did not come from the prosperity of the Solana ecosystem, but from Mable Jiang’s Houlang podcast. In the podcast, Mable said that the Solana founding team attaches great importance to market value management, and is sincere and willing to embrace the most basic logic of the currency circle. This is the true nature of Solana.

Of course, continuing with the story of Solana, Solana’s POH (Proof of History) and outages once made it a joke in the crypto circle, and it comes up from time to time.

But just like Solana can climb up from the lowest point, it can recover from every outage. Thanks to relying on physical time to verify the block status, Solana has truly achieved the ultimate performance route, but at the cost of the "computer room chain" and non-scalability.

Ethereum has more than 7,000 nodes, while Solana has less than 3,000. However, Ethereum’s mainnet TPS is only between 12 and 15, and Arbitrum One can barely break through 20. This is when we see the horror of Solana. The official claims 65,000, and the daily operation is also 2,500-3,000.

In this inscription test, Solana is almost the only Layer 1 that can withstand artificial DDOS, which is much stronger than the Cosmos system. In addition, after the future Firedancer upgrade, the theoretical TPS can reach 1 million+, and the daily TPS is estimated to reach 100,000+. This is also the main factor for Visa and DePIN to choose Solana.

A smile that brings back old grudges: Solana’s past is worth looking back on

We won’t discuss the price too much, but the fact that Solana survived the FTX collapse is a miracle in itself. Putting aside the conventional analysis to fill up the word count, I think there are only three points that contributed to the successful rescue of Solana.

1. Multi-point layout, the ecosystem maintains the lower limit. After the sudden disaster, Solana was hit, Maple Finance left, and Magic Eden tried multi-chain layout, but the market knew that this was not Solana's problem, and Solana was not particularly dependent on a certain project, so it finally recovered;

A year later, in December 2023, Solana's market capitalization was less than 30 billion, about 10% of Ethereum, and in September, SOL's trading volume was only 3% of ETH's in the same period. It can be seen that Solana has recovered, but killing Ethereum is still a pipe dream.

2. Soft alliance, capital support, automatic lock-up, effective at a certain time. Solana and FTX are not self-developed public chains like Binance and BSC, but external ecological alliances. FTX buys SOL that needs to be unlocked. As long as it is not declared dead immediately, there is time to maneuver. Solana's investors are top capitals such as a16z and Multicoin, which have raised $300 million. They will not just watch SOL go directly to zero, and they will always try to rescue it if they can.

3. Irreplaceability for Mass Adaption, especially DePIN and Web2 applications. This point is overlooked by many people. Solana successfully supported the needs of STEPN. This is also a project that really made Web3 stand out. It is worth mentioning that Mable also worked at STEPN. All are connected.

The earliest time I realized the importance of Solana to DePIN was not the surge in Mobile today, but the fact that Render network was preparing to migrate from Polygon to Solana. This was a proposal in March. At that time, Solana was not favored and caused heated debate in the RNDR community. At that time, I felt that Solana’s importance to projects like DePIN could not be replaced.

Projects like DePIN are different from high-value DeFi applications. They are closer to traditional IoT (Internet of Things) concepts such as edge computing, and they value stability and low prices. Solana naturally has an advantage in synchronization speed. Taking the currently popular Helium as an example, the number of IoTs has reached more than 300,000, and there are more than 3,000 5G devices. Only Solana can meet the deployment of a large amount of hardware.

Marketing first, Meme and DeFi are on the same page

Solana is actually a very special public chain. On the one hand, high-end DeFi projects such as LSD and Jito have very clever economic mechanisms; on the other hand, for a long time I couldn’t understand why they wanted to make a mobile phone, and it was a shoddy public model phone. Now Solana actually uses Bonk as a mobile phone marketing tool and Helium for mobile packages.

• Bonk: Web 3 marketing tactics. You used to ignore Meme and Sage, but now they are sold out. Hardware devices will continue to be used, which is unique in Web3.

• Helium: A cheap version of the mobile package. In the case of extremely strong US operators, the packages from the Web3 world rely on price wars and can appreciate in value. It is foreseeable that traditional users will be slightly shocked by Web3.

• dApp: Transaction fees and DeFi promotion are built into Sage, getting rid of the ineffective internal circulation of Web3 and allowing traditional old money to take over. This is called the pattern.

Anyway, the best definition of a project like Solana is not a public chain, but a product with an artistic temperament. In the past, only Silicon Valley companies that started with hardware, such as Apple, could handle it. Solana is similar to Google and Microsoft, all of which hope to enter the market from the software. Google's Pixel cannot be considered a failure, but it can only be said to be unsuccessful. Microsoft is a real failure. Can Solana break this curse?

Simply relying on Meme/NFT/Ponzi traffic packages will not work sooner or later, but it is indeed worth looking forward to what new tricks Solana will come up with.

Danger prediction, can SOL surpass Ethereum?

If you believe that SOL is the next Ethereum, then the current gap between the two is about 10 times, and SOL can rise to 700 US dollars. However, the world is not deterministic or linear. The EVM ecosystem includes a 300 billion mainnet public chain, more than a dozen L2s, dozens of EVM-compatible chains, 1,600+ commonly used dapps, and millions of active users.

SOL currently only has itself, which is destined to be a difficult road, but providing a second option outside of Ethereum is unique in itself.