From zero to a new high of $100 billion, Solana’s road to rebirth

I will buy all the SOL you own at the market price of $3 right now, you can sell it as you like, and then get out. This was the reply of FTX founder SBF on Twitter to a trader who was not optimistic about Solana on January 10, 2021. SOL is about to usher in a huge buy order because every billionaire in the world is calling me and SBF (consulting Solana).

On December 1 of the same year, Kyle Saman, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, tweeted that the price of SOL had exceeded $230 at that time, with an increase of more than 150 times throughout the year, becoming a star in the entire 暗号 industry.

Heres why the Solana chain disappeared and the SOL token went to zero. This was a tweet from ETH maximalist James Spediaccid, who predicted that SOL would be cleared from the crypto market in December 2022, a year later. At that time, SOL was affected by the crypto winter and FTXs bankruptcy, falling to as low as $8, a drop of more than 96% in more than a year, almost to zero.

Only Possible On Solana, when the community collectively shouted this slogan, on November 22, 2024, the price of SOL reached $260, breaking through the highest point of the previous bull market. The increase from the low point to the high point was more than 30 times, completing the phoenix nirvana.

Solana’s First Half of Life

Solana’s Birth Story

A $100 billion start doesn’t seem to be that uncommon. Anatoly Yakovenko, a Ukrainian former Qualcomm engineer, wanted to build an on-chain order book trading platform. Then he quickly discovered that Ethereum could not handle such a large throughput of on-chain transactions. One night, Anatoly drank 3 cups of coffee, tossed and turned, and couldn’t sleep, so he got up and wrote the initial Solana code.

According to Mable, Chief Revenue Officer of STEPN and former partner of Multicoin Capital, Solana did not have a smooth fundraising process in her podcast. In 2018, the Solana team went to Asia for financing, which coincided with the crypto market being in a bear market, and the market had been hurt many times by the rhetoric of high-performance public chains, so Solanas financing in China, South Korea, and Japan was blocked everywhere.

In 2019, Anatoly, who attended the Blockchain Week in Shanghai, was already somewhat famous. At that time, new chains such as Solana and Near kept appearing at various peripheral activities. Anatoly explained to others what Solana was over and over again, but most people didnt pay much attention. Just like Vitalik in China a few years ago.

Finally, after multiple rounds of fundraising, the Solana team raised $25.53 million, which is far lower than the current star public chains that raise hundreds of millions of dollars, and also lower than the public chains such as Near and Avalanche that released tokens in the same period of the previous round.

The Rise of Solana — SBF’s Choice

In fact, after the mainnet was launched, few people paid attention to Solana. For example, the network was interrupted due to some problems, and no one in the community noticed it. It was not until the second half of 2020 that Solana officially entered the public eye. There is only one reason for this, that is, the founder of FTX, SBF, came. Solanas real rise is absolutely inseparable from the support of SBF. According to Mable, the meeting of SBF and Solana was more like a mutual choice than an accident.

At that time, FTX had just been established for a year and quickly occupied its own territory in the trading track. SBF, who came from Wall Street, really made the crypto industry see something different. Not only was the trading tool experience different from other competing products, but SBF himself also deeply cultivated the industry and participated in all the hot spots.

At the beginning of DeFi Summer, SBF wanted to put as many transactions as possible on the chain. So the SBF team took the initiative to contact star public chains such as Polygon, Avalanche and Near. The rumor in the market was that FTX was most interested in Near, but it would take some time for their mainnet to go online, but SBF couldnt wait. After Kyle from Multicoin learned the news, he found a way to get someone to introduce Anatoly to SBF.

In the early morning of July 2020, Kyle and SBF had a 3-hour communication, and SBF became interested. The next day, the Solana chain was suddenly attacked by dust, and countless small transactions occurred on Solana at the same time and for a long time. Yes, it was SBF who did it. He wanted to test the actual performance of the Solana chain himself. In the end, Solana withstood the massive junk transactions from the SBF team. On the same day, SBF decided to invest in Solana. A few days later, the design of Serum, a decentralized order book matching engine incubated by FTX itself, was born.

Subsequently, the Solana ecosystem experienced a growth spurt.

The Rise of Solana’s Ecosystem

First, Serum had a market capitalization of over $1 billion at its peak, and Solana ecosystem projects such as Raydium, Oxygen, and Star Atlas were listed on FTX.

Not only that, FTXs support means that other centralized trading platforms have to start accessing and supporting this new Layer 1 network, which has greatly increased the priority of Solana-related scheduling for major centralized trading platforms. SBF also personally organized a group for Jeremy, CEO of Anatoly and USDCs parent company Circle, to support USDCs integration with the Solana chain.

In addition to SBFs support, the Solana team itself is also actively hosting hackathons to attract developers from all over the world. It can be said that todays Solana hackathon has become an important source of vitality for the Solana ecosystem. Relying on the performance advantage and SBFs unprecedented absolute pull ability, the Solana token SOL has risen from less than $1 to a peak of $248 in 2021, and a myth was born.

At that time, Solana ranked behind the top Ethereum and BSC, and could not be said to be the absolute king of the public chain ecosystem, but compared with Avalanche and Near of the same period, Solana had basically changed with the support of FTX, but no one expected that SBF would actually get into trouble.

Ending

The crypto winter of 2022 is here, and with the collapse of Terra (Luna) Ecosystem and Three Arrow Capital (3AC), market panic continues to spread. In the end, under the combined force of internal and external factors, Solana’s biggest supporter, and the most powerful supporter in the industry at the time, also fell – FTX declared bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy of FTX and Alameda has seriously affected the entire Solana ecosystem. Not only did the Solana Foundation suffer a loss of more than $180 million in crypto assets, but it also directly destroyed Serum, an important underlying protocol of the Solana DeFi ecosystem. Because important permissions were held by FTX, this cornerstone protocol was soon declared invalid.

Affected by this series of devastating events, Solanas TVL (Total Value Locked) has also fallen from the bull market peak of 10 billion to around 200 million US dollars. A series of star projects have chosen to leave the Solana ecosystem and move to the EVM chain.

To make matters worse, Solana’s technology has also had frequent problems. In mid-2022, the network was interrupted several times due to a surge in transaction volume. All this has raised questions about the reliability of its technology. Downtime chain seems to have become Solana’s exclusive term.

The community was wailing, and the SOL token continued to fall. It seemed that Solana was unable to recover.

Solana’s New Life

Five days after the SOL token dropped to $8, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted a tweet.

“Some smart people told me that Solana has a genuine community of smart developers, that the horrible opportunistic funds have now been laundered, and that the chain has a bright future.

It’s hard for me to judge from the outside, but I want the community to have a fair chance to thrive.”

Vitaliks words seemed to be a reassurance, and the SOL token rose accordingly. The panic of the Solana community was alleviated in the subsequent continuous rise.

In the days that followed, in addition to Multicoins continued firm support for Solana, Chris from Placeholder has been publicly supporting Solana since December 2022. Another partner, Joel Monegro, who once wrote the fat protocol at USV, wrote an article comparing Ethereum and Solana in October 2023, pointing out that Ethereum is like Android, while Solana is more like iOS.

As for what happened in 2024, everyone knows that the dust attack that SBF tested in the early morning became a reality. When hundreds of new assets were issued every minute and tens of thousands of transactions were carried out simultaneously, only Solana could perfectly support this huge trading feast. With the birth of a meme with a market value of billions of dollars, SOL, from $8, also reached a historical high with a market value of 100 billion.

Why is Solana reaching a new high?

Precise rhythm control of the team and the foundation

In the darkest moment after the collapse of FTX, Solanas fate seemed to have been determined. FTX is not only an investor in Solana, but also one of its most important ecological promoters. However, the collapse of FTX not only made Solana lose its strongest ally, but also pushed it to the edge of market trust.

Faced with such a crisis, the Solana Foundation chose a pragmatic path to revival. They quickly disclosed all Alameda-related assets to show the transparency of financial status, while significantly optimizing network infrastructure and effectively reducing downtime by improving verification mechanisms and transaction flow control. This persistence in not being moved by external pressure has won back some trust from the community for Solana.

However, what really made the market pay attention to Solana again was not just its technological improvements, but the value it created for developers and users through practical actions.

Hackathon: The Engine of the Solana Ecosystem

Since the end of 2022, the Solana Foundation has stepped up its efforts to organize hackathon events, attracting the attention of developers around the world. These events not only enhanced community vitality, but also incubated a number of highly promising projects.

According to incomplete statistics, in the past three years, more than 60,000 developers participated in the hackathons held by Solana, more than 4,000 projects were launched, and the cumulative financing exceeded US$600 million, giving birth to star projects such as Jito, Tensor, io.net, Marinade, and Solend.

Hackathons are not only a platform for developers to communicate, but also an important source of innovation for the Solana ecosystem. Many projects were quickly implemented after the hackathon, injecting strong momentum into the prosperity of the ecosystem.

The Triumph of Pragmatism

Mable, who witnessed the rise of Solana, mentioned in summarizing the reasons for Solanas success, The founder of Solana has a small ego, and the entire team is very pragmatic. They dont have too many obsessions, and they dont think they have to have a set of things that are regarded as the bible. They will try whatever can help the project gain more attention and recognition. They are not afraid of embarrassment and will try again if they fail.

Solana did not shout the slogan of disruption or changing the world, but instead focused on improving efficiency and reducing costs. With the ability to process more than 65,000 transactions per second and transaction costs as low as $0.00025, Solana has become the preferred network for MEME transactions. This strategy of focusing on practical applications has also made Solanas ecosystem present a wide diversity, covering all aspects of user life from payment tools to Web3 social to consumer-grade devices.

This technical and pragmatic style is not only popular in the crypto world, but also has won the recognition of traditional financial institutions. Financial giants such as Visa have piloted cross-border payments on the Solana chain, verifying the potential of Solana technology. These collaborations not only expand Solanas application scenarios, but also open the door for it to penetrate into the mainstream financial world.

要約する

Solanas performance in 2024 was outstanding, showing strong on-chain economic vitality, and even approaching or even surpassing Ethereum in multiple key indicators. Relying on its ultra-high transaction throughput and extremely low transaction costs, Solana has become an excellent choice for high-frequency transactions on the chain. The number of active user addresses and on-chain transaction volume continued to rise, especially driven by the MEME coin craze, pumpfun attracted a large number of new users, making Solana the center of secondary market transactions.

From hitting the bottom to getting back on top, Solanas story may not only be the victory of a project, but also a symbol of the resilience of the crypto industry. In terms of price performance, SOLs market value has reached 33% of Ethereum, soaring more than 18 times from the bear market low. Such growth not only reflects the markets recognition of Solanas technological advantages, but also demonstrates its strong ecological recovery capabilities and market appeal. Whether it is the trading boom of payment, DeFi or MEME coins, Solana is using actual data to prove that zeroing to the top is Only Possible On Solana.

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