The Annual Growth Rate Is As High As 480%, Is Solana the Ecosystem King Returning?

[TL；DR]:

Recently, the Solana (SOL) coin price has reached new highs, hitting $46 during the Breakpoint period (breakpoint meeting from October 30th to November 3rd), with an increase of nearly 170% in the past two months.

Solana is still striving to emerge from the haze and actively building its unique competitiveness: strong trading performance, sufficient operating nodes, and a highly recognized community.

Relying on increasingly improved underlying technologies and community governance models, Solana is striving to become a highly valuable and unique eco infrastructure for Web3, and will still have a place in the L1 field.

Introduction

Despite being dragged down by the FTX and SBF events, Solana (SOL) fell into silence for a while, but since mid September, SOL has grown by nearly 170% to become the most profitable public chain token in recent times. This project, known as the “Ethereum Killer” in the previous bull market, is announcing its rebirth and opening a new eco chapter with the strongest rebound.

The Soaring Price of SOL is the Most Eye-catching Focus Under the Bull Market Sentiment

Since being implicated in the FTX crisis at the end of last year, Solana has rarely been able to strike back as fiercely as recently.

Every bull market has new narratives and projects that become the focus of the market, and the golden rule for crypto investors is to ‘fry the new rather than the old’. Solana, a project that was dragged down by FTX in last year’s bear market, has not been able to get out of the quagmire, with standard downtime stuck, eco projects repeatedly attacked, new public chain Aptos, Sui, Sei, and many L2 players chasing each other. Solana seems to have fallen into the withering state of yesterday’s flowers.

Until recently, the Solana (SOL) coin price hit new highs, hitting $46 during the Breakpoint period (breakpoint meeting from October 30th to November 3rd), with an increase of nearly 170% in the past two months and a cumulative increase of 480% this year, setting a record high in 14 months.

SOL Price Trend Chart 1 Source: Gate.io

According to DefiLlama’s statistics on various public chains, SOL has rapidly climbed from over 20 in the early days to the 8th place in terms of TVL, with active users ranking 7th and 24-hour transaction volume ranking 5th.

In addition to SOL itself, many eco projects in Solana have also seen a surge. The decentralized exchange Raydium token RAY has seen its highest increase of 145% in the past month, while POLIS and ATLAS in Star Atlas games have increased by 230% and 145% respectively. The TVL of MEV infrastructure development platform Jito has increased by 311% in the past month, while the TVL and governance tokens of Marinade Finance (MNDE) in the liquidity staking sector have both increased by over 150%.

Many users attribute this to Solana’s manipulation behavior of having to control the disk higher every time a Breakpoint occurs, but this ignores the fundamental foundation of the Solana community’s “post disaster” eco and technological revival. Arthur, the founder of DeFianace Capital, joked that if breakpoint meetings were so effective in addressing SOL increases, they could hold such meetings every week.

The Road to Revival in a Bear Market

It is obvious that the recent impressive rise of SOL is driven by the market rebound brought by the upward trend of BTC market and the many positive factors of Breakpoint.

But upon closer examination, we found that compared to other public chains, SOL naturally has other motivations beyond premium performance.

In the first quarter of this year, Solana increased its funding for the project eco, including Hacker Houses and Hacker Grizzlython, and released the “Network Improvement and Upgrade Plan” aimed at improving the Solana upgrade process, improving the network user experience, and introducing external developers and auditors to test and inspect vulnerabilities.

The most eye-catching solution in the second quarter was the revolutionary solution of state compression, which Solana launched to significantly reduce the cost of storing data. Taking NFT as an example, it can reduce costs by 2400-24000 times.

The third quarter mainly focused on the connection between stitching and the Ethereum eco, including the launch of the EVM compatibility solution Neon and the launch of a smart contract compiler that supports the Solidity language.

Solana’s work during the bear market was not in vain. Shopify and Visa have successively announced the integration of Solana into their payment s. MakerDAO founder Rune also praised Solana as the most promising code library that can serve as the foundation for MakerDAO to build a new blockchain.

Entering the fourth quarter, the biggest surprise so far will be the release of Solana’s second node validator, Firedancer, on the Breakpoint test network, which will help improve Solana’s block stability, making it more resilient to attacks and processing.

Breakpoint 2023 Highlights Figure 2 Source: @ Solana

Indeed, the competition in the public chain track may shift towards modularity and L2, but Solana is still struggling to emerge from the haze and actively building its unique competitiveness: strong trading performance, sufficient operating nodes, and a highly recognized community.

Solana’s Future Direction

From the recent series of actions taken by Solana, it seems that they are aiming to achieve sustainable expansion by leveraging their past strengths in eco construction and upgrading technology.

Solana officially held two hacker marathons this year to reward and fund Solana’s on-chain eco projects, covering various fields including Deposit, AI, DeFi, payment, gaming, mobile user DApp, infrastructure, DAO, and more.

In addition, Solana also launched a customized support program for startups at the end of October, including design and development work, financial support from Solana Ventures and other VCs, and leveraging brand advantages to help projects seek market share.

This year’s Breakpoint 2023 conference also saw the latest technological implementation progress, as summarized by the media as follows:

-The Solana client Firedancer developed by Jump Crypto has been running on the testing network. This client can optimize Solana’s network performance and scalability, reduce dependence on Solana Labs developed clients, and reduce the risk of network wide interruptions caused by software failures.

-The decentralized computing network Render Network has successfully upgraded its core infrastructure from Ethereum to Solana.

-Solana nodes can now be quickly deployed on AWS through the infrastructure code in the AWS Blockchain Node Runners repository, and Solana data can now be accessed on the serverless data warehouse BigQuery on Google Cloud.

-SwissBorg achieved integration with Solana through Orca.

-Sling built a P2P payment platform based on USDC.

These business support and project progress are driving Solana towards a positive spiral path, and the return of the king is unstoppable.

With the help of market heat, Solana’s on-chain oracle Python and aggregator Jupiter have recently announced airdrops, which will be distributed to 75,000 and 995,000 addresses respectively. Especially, the latter’s reward method that takes into account large and individual investors will undoubtedly further boost market heat.

Solana Summer Camp Hackathon Figure 3 Source: Solana

Meanwhile, Solana’s external business is also constantly increasing its momentum. Recently, Solana officially announced that the Solana node is ready to be deployed on AWS (Amazon Web Sevices), 3D rendering solution provider Render has moved from Ethereum to Solana, and stablecoin issuer Circle has recently announced that its Euro stablecoin EURC and CCTP are about to land on Solana.

Killer-level underlying public chains are more likely to generate killer level applications. After removing a series of negative labels, Solana’s development direction and construction pace have finally become clearer, and in the future, it will also be easier to have popular DAPP to obtain feedback.

As Vitalik Buterin said on Twitter, a smart person told him that Solana is a serious and smart development community, and now those scary and opportunistic people have been washed away.

To Sum Up

Overall, relying on increasingly improved underlying technologies and community governance models, Solana is striving to become a highly valuable and unique eco infrastructure for Web3, and will still have a place in the L1 field.

Of course, as Breakpoint draws to a close, Solana’s high attention will calm down, while the market pressure brought about by the FTX case has not yet ended. Against the backdrop of not yet relaxed liquidity, there may be uncertainty in the market’s later stages, especially for investors who have not been able to enter, who still need to carefully observe and avoid the potential risks brought by FOMO.

Presently, Ethereum is still the unshakable king of the public chain, but Solana has emerged from its low point and is pursuing it head-on. In the context of the early development of the encryption market, whether it is high-quality L1, L2, or other infrastructure solutions, everyone should have a bright future.