Will the 300% monthly increase in SOL continue?

Solana Breakpoint 2023 is the annual ecosystem conference held by the Solana community in Amsterdam from October 30 to November 3. Many projects in the Solana ecosystem updated their project progress at the conference. The author of this article further discussed the evolution of Breakpoint, the development of Solana in the past year, and the governance discussion of Solana.

What kind of market are we in today?

Is it a bull market, a bear market, or something in between?

Attending conferences is one of the best ways to truly understand what is happening in the market.

By attending the conference, we can get a first-hand understanding of how many developers in the ecosystem are building, what they are building, what challenges they are facing, and what are the most important priorities that need to be addressed.

It’s easy to see what holes in the technology stack need to be filled, what customer needs are not being met, and how strong the developer’s sense of mission is. Attending Breakpoint conferences over the years has given me an incredible insight into the state of Solana.

Solana’s Past

This is my second time attending Breakpoint. The first was in Lisbon in late 2021, and I was planning to attend Breakpoint 2022, but unfortunately tore ligaments in my shoulder and had to stay home (very disappointed to miss it, but still keeping an eye out!).

In 2021, the peak of the bull market bubble, the price of $SOL exceeded $200. Solana's total locked value (TVL) continued to rise, and its blockchain design, characterized by scalability, throughput, low latency, and wide composability, won everyone's favor.

There are many excellent developers among the participants. Developers from other ecosystems are exploring cross-chain deployment and even migrating to Solana. There are also many strong investors, enterprises and even large Web2 companies.

However, there are also some people who didn’t really understand the technology and just bought the tokens early and made a lot of money. Solana has a lot of potential, but the network is still in the early stages of adoption.

Like other fledgling projects in the crypto space at the time ($Bnb, $Matic, etc.), expectations were higher than reality in the short term.

The bursting of the 2022 bull market bubble, the collapse of 3AC (Three Arrows Capital), the collapse of LUNA, and the failure of BlockFi, Voyager, and Celsius have caused panic and instability, causing all token prices to fall, endangering all good players building in the cryptocurrency field.

$SOL price dropped from over $200 to around $30 (almost all other major assets dropped by a similar amount or more). Solana suffered from network instability, which severely damaged its credibility. Some large applications were eliminated, and many early tokens were short-sighted, with low floating volume and high FDV, which harmed the ecosystem.

Despite this, the community has shown great resilience (more on this below), remaining in the ecosystem, making technical reinforcement improvements, and showing signs of new developments. Solana has become the unrivaled second NFT ecosystem, second only to Ethereum.

The momentum of innovation and high-profile partnerships is palpable. Helium announced a migration from its own network to Solana. QUIC and Stake-Weighted QOS have already been deployed.

Fee markets are rolling out, along with priority transaction fees. Increased transaction sizes, compact voting states, and Firedancer are in development. Saga Mobile is announced, reinforcing the network’s focus on mobile apps.

Breakpoint 2022 is a bear market conference in every sense. The focus is on building and improving infrastructure to support the next stage of application scenarios and enhance the experience of current users. Many core technologies have been announced, are running on test networks or are being deployed.

Market sentiment is generally weak, but the Solana community is holding on and building as hard as ever.

As the conference ended, news spread about FTX, which along with Alameda Research has been one of the biggest supporters of the Solana ecosystem in terms of investment, liquidity, visibility, and infrastructure, and Solana’s token price fell from $30 to under $10.

People openly questioned whether Solana could survive the fallout from the FTX fraud. Many said Solana was dead.

Worst of all, some in the crypto space seem to take pleasure in the decline of a once-prosperous ecosystem. Still, it’s clear that Solana shows no signs of going away.

The community has united in a way I have never seen in crypto, with founders supporting other founders, and where some investors left, others continued to invest, but there are still others who are holding their ground.

Solana’s Twitter (now renamed “X”) became a place of constant encouragement, tenacity, and support. The community held hackathons to drive development. BONK was released as a rallying cry.

Some NFTs left Solana, but the users and NFT liquidity on Solana did not leave, and it is as strong as ever.

New NFT projects, such as Mad Lads and Claynosaurs, started out in the bear market and became strong players.

Render announced that it will move to Solana. DeFi began to rise again. Visa announced that it will be based on Solana. MakerDAO predicted that its native chain has the potential to develop into an SVM chain. MakerDAO hinted at the potential of their native chain to develop into an SVM chain.

Some extreme cryptocurrency players are beginning to wonder if they were too hasty to write off Solana. After strengthening the network’s stability, Solana’s technology is beginning to speak for itself.

Its multi-threaded architecture allows for local fee markets, parallelization, and scaling with modern hardware (hardware requirements for validators are actually decreasing at the same time).

This means applications don’t have to contend for network resources or face unpredictable fees. It also means scaling can happen on L1 without the need for additional execution environments, which often sacrifice composability and/or decentralization.

Compressing NFTs makes NFT minting 100x cheaper than other networks, and over time this will scale to extensive data compression, allowing you to have not just 10K PFP collections, but also DePin networks, games with millions of in-game items, and on-chain loyalty programs designed for global scale.

Solana is not just an L1, but SVM becomes the key infrastructure of modular blockchain design. SVM application chain, SVM L2 secured by other networks, etc.

Looking into the future through "Breakpoint 2023"

Heading into “Breakpoint 2023,” the tide is turning, but not everyone in crypto is paying attention to all the progress made over the past year following the FTX incident.

"Breakpoint 2023" If the FTX incident did not happen, where would Solana be? We don't know. "Breakpoint 2023" is full of high-quality, top-level builders, and the team is not only building in infrastructure, DeFi, wallets, NFTs, DePin and other fields.

All of the Solana infrastructure improvements discussed for 2022 have already been implemented. There was a lot of passion in the meeting, but that passion was purposeful and driven. The sentiment around the potential for the year ahead felt like a regime shift was happening, moving firmly from a bear market into a bull market.

While the price of $SOL doubled around the conference (from ~$20 to as high as $47), there was little discussion about the price. Instead, everyone recognized that the token price increase was at best a content marketing exercise to attract new users and developers, and was in fact of little significance.

Everyone is self-aware that sustainable growth requires more on-chain users, more traction, more applications and use cases, and is focused on achieving this goal. The meeting was filled with a sense of self-awareness about the work, but at the same time it was also clear that the conditions required to achieve the goal were already in place.

Leaving "Breakpoint 2023", I am more bullish on Solana's future than ever and believe it will play a major role in the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency.

I expect that in the next 2 years, many Solana-specific use cases will be built. This includes high-performance and composable DeFi, payment applications, which are an order of magnitude cheaper and faster than Web2 or traditional banking alternatives.

Pioneering decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs), internet-scale NFTs, mobile-optimized gaming and social consumer apps, next-generation wallets, and the infrastructure to support all of the above. If you’re developing in these areas or others, I’d love to talk to you.