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After FTX declared bankruptcy, the Solana public chain, which was fully supported by it, was hit hard and fell into trouble: the price of the public chain token SOL plummeted from a high of $100 to less than $10 (it has now recovered to $22); The last TVL fell nearly 98% from the historical high; then there was a 48-hour downtime in February this year, but no one noticed. Faced with a large loss of users, node strikes, and even the departure of well-known NFT projects DeGods and y 00 ts, the efforts of the Solana Foundation seem so weak. The Solana public chain, which was once glorious and most likely to become the "Ethereum killer", has now fallen into a situation where no one cares about it.

Solana's inextricability to FTX may be one of the reasons for its success, but it doesn't have to be. This article is compiled from the podcast content released by Mable, Chief Revenue Officer of STEPN and former partner of Multicoin Capital in January 2023. As an investment institution with a heavy position in Solana, Multicoin Capital can be described as success or failure.

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Highlights of this issue

Solana's life experience geometry?

What did Solana do right from zero to one?

How did SBF and Solana choose each other?

How has SBF changed Solana?

How did Solana's developer ecosystem develop?

How did Solana start to be used by anyone?

Where does Solana go when FTX crashes today?

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Solana's Birth Story

Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer of Ukrainian origin, founded Solana in early 2018 with his old friend Raj Gokal, who was later Solana's COO. Anatoly later invited his boss at Qualcomm to join Solana.

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Solana's Difficult Fundraising Phase

The Wanxiang Blockchain Conference 19 years ago was held in Shanghai, and people from all over the world flocked to it. If the project party wants to gain voice or exposure, it will definitely go to Shanghai and Hangzhou in the summer. In 2018 and 19, even when the bear market was bad, China was considered a relatively active fertile ground. At that time, in the blockchain industry, Chinese capital still had a considerable voice, and project parties were willing to come to China for financing. Solana came to China to raise funds at that time. I still clearly remember that from Beijing to Shanghai to Seoul, they held events in various places, telling everyone what Solana is and why they want to do this project. Foreign projects are usually very busy when they are financing, and even at night, they may try their best to cultivate relationships with some investors.

Anatoly and Raj, as well as chief scientist Eric Williams, and Dom, a community operation they recruited on Discord or Telegram in the early days, is now a senior figure, and they are all on this Asian financing trip.In fact, they all tried to raise funds in China, South Korea and Japan, but they were not successful. It should be said that they hit walls everywhere. On the one hand, it was because their stories were not so exciting, and Chinese investors did not buy it.So many times they can only invite a few friends they met in Asia to drink in their city.

At that time, many people told the story of this kind of high-performance public chain, but in the end it was all a mess, so everyone didn't believe it. Secondly, because of the bear market, everyone kept their money more cautiously in their pockets. I hadn’t worked at Multicoin Capital at that time, and I spent a lot of time surfing the Internet to learn during the day, and then I chatted with overseas projects when they came to China for roadshows. I basically meet and see, so there are a lot of evenings spent drinking with Raj, Anatoly. What impresses me deeply is that Anatoly prefers to drink straight whiskey. Obviously, if they can find other investors willing to talk to them, they may not chat with me as often.

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Solana's Rich History - Simple Beginnings

So I will talk to you about how Solana got up, and some ups and downs from my perspective. First of all, I think the first topic is what many people care about Solana doing right from 0 to 1.

Talking about their humble beginnings, Solana were never a team born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Compared with the currently more active, or one-tier smart contract platform that everyone is discussing, that is what we call the public chain. Solana may be a non-EVM-compatible public chain team with the least amount of private equity and public equity in history.

When I was working on this program, I suddenly remembered that the Polygon team was actually more difficult than Solana at that time. How difficult is it? In 2018, their original founder JD went out to raise funds. At that time, the Ethereum side chain should be said to be blooming everywhere. Many people also questioned their security and felt that there was no guarantee. In addition, the team was mediocre.JD English has a strong Indian accent and no one even wants to vote for him. So before they went to Binance Launchpad, only Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures invested in them. They thought what if it would happen, and now it seems that this event has indeed happened. The two combined may have invested less than $1 million.

Later, I checked on Messari, and they sold 18 points of tokens for their public offering of 5 million US dollars. It is unimaginable, because the difference between equity financing and currency rights financing is very large, so any project only sells 18% of tokens with one institution. It is absolutely shocking and weeping ghosts and gods. For some projects, it may only add up to 15% of the entire team. Of course, this 18% token is given to traders on Binance, so it can be regarded as distributed to the community, but it seems almost unimaginable today.

There are also some Rollup teams, such as Optimism and StarkWare, who have raised a lot of money because of their orthodoxy, which is very interesting. These sidechain teams, or some Rollup teams, have not directly captured the value of the Ethereum network, so in a sense, they can also be said to be a layer 1 smart contract platform, of course, because they all rely on the layer 2 network . This is what their narrative says, so we won’t repeat it here.

Because I talked about this topic, I went to find some data, which is a comparison between Solana and other active public chains. You can refer to it, and I also found it from Messari.

First of all, let’s look at the Avalanche protocol. In February 2019, it raised $6 million in the first round of financing in Shenzhen Xiong. Its founder is Emin Gun Sirer, who is relatively vigorous in the field of cryptography. November 2018 was the deep bear in the last cycle. Bitcoin fell to 3,000 points, but after three months they were able to raise another $6 million, which is quite impressive. Then before the first wave of DeFi Summer started in June 2020, they raised another 12 million US dollars, all of which were private placements. A month later, they raised $37.5 million in a public offering, for a total of $55.5 million in primary market funding.

Then the Near team was actually very active in China from 2017 to 2019. In the third quarter of 2017, before the peak of the bull market, they had already raised US$810,000, and then in the third quarter of 2018. In the first quarter of 2019, it raised US$8.48 million, and then in the second quarter of the same year, it raised US$375,000. The total financing amount was US$12 million. At the beginning of 2020, they completed a round A financing of more than 21 million.

When I encountered some technical problems during the public offering, the public offering added up to more than 30 million US dollars, because he did not have a very specific financing record, but the total was more than 30 million US dollars in financing, so the total private placement and public offering was 63 million US dollars financing.

Look at Solana again. In April 2018, it completed a seed round of US$3.17 million, in June of the same year it completed a financing of US$12.6 million, and in July 2019, a node called Validator Sales raised US$5.7 million. , In February 2020, they completed a financing of 2.3 million US dollars before the public offering, which was a little more expensive than the public offering price. They later closed a $1.76 million round of financing. So they raised $25.53 million in private equity + public equity. Compare the $63 million raised by the Near team to the $25.53 million raised by the Solana team. Funny what do I think? That is, they also wrote in the financing information how many Bitcoins and Ethereum were melted in each round, which has very strong characteristics of the previous cycle.

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Solana is in doubt

Several co-founders of Solana belong to the founders of atypical blockchain projects. Compared with some projects pursued by more investment institutions in 2017 and 2018, the Solana team all came from large Silicon Valley factories. Startup team starting a business. Anatoly already has 3 children. They neither have a very powerful talented young architect like V God, nor have a very shining background, nor some have a very strong academic background. For example, the founders of Avalanche belong to This kind.

Judging from the team background, they are regarded as second- and third-rate by many investors.Anatoly is a very down-to-earth guy, he doesn't like to talk big, he is a shy type offline. Raj Gokal knew nothing about marketing storytelling before becoming COO. In the earliest days, some investors and their employees privately doubted Raj's ability to become the second most important role in the project. Some early big investors even tried to observe him, thinking that if the ability is not enough, it is necessary to ask the team to replace it. Of course, there is no such thing as governance rights in token financing, and there is no such thing as a so-called board seat. It's more about pure influence between people. Investors put pressure on it, and of course it doesn't matter whether the team listens or not.

During the period when the Solana team was raising funds in China, they also went to various mining pools to send graphics cards to these mining pools. The mining pools are used to dig out POW coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Sort. The mining pool they were looking for included the largest Ethereum mining pool in the world at the time. Of course, this mining pool has now been shut down in accordance with relevant laws and regulations. Later, the people from the mining pool told me that they tried to run the Solana node, but the WiFi in their office crashed, so they gave up and did not participate in the validator node later.

Many people will say that Solana's Proof of History is a gimmick, forcibly creating a new consensus algorithm other than Proof of Stake and Proof of Work. Those who understand know that history proves that it is not a new consensus algorithm. Solana's consensus algorithm is still Proof of Stake, and the main task of historical proof is to solve the problem of transaction timestamp confirmation on the chain under high throughput conditions.

In fact, in essence, all event transactions on Solana nodes are hashed using the SHA 256 hash function, and then this function will generate a very unpredictable unique output after receiving one input, and the Solana chain is obtaining the output of the transaction Use it as input for the next hash, which confirms a continuous chain of encrypted transactions, or an unambiguous sequence of verifiable transactions on the chain. In layman's terms, Solana is a block first and then a consensus. Of course, because the purpose of today's podcast is not to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Solana's technology, so here is a brief introduction as background knowledge, mainly to explain that everyone did not trust Solana's series of narratives at that time.

Originally, Anatoly thought this kind of narrative was a great (great, glorious, and correct) thing, but in fact, the story of this high-performance public chain may have been heard badly in Asia, and he felt that it was just hype. Many people think that there are not many applications that can use the blockchain, so a high-performance public chain is just a false proposition.At that time, the price of Solana was actually very low. It would be unbelievable today. Solana’s first round of valuation was 20 million U.S. dollars, and the second round was 100 million U.S. dollars, and the round of validator nodes was 112 million U.S. dollars. , the last round of strategic private placement should be $122 million.

What is the concept of a $20 million valuation? At the end of 2021, Aptos, which is very popular recently, is not currency-right financing but equity financing is already at 1 billion US dollars, so its currency-right mapping may be more expensive, because it is not 1: 1. If it is based on equity The price is already 50 times higher. 20 million compared with 1 billion, at most it may be that the Aptos mainnet launch is counted from the time of financing. The time is indeed shorter, but not much shorter.

I think another frame of reference for comparison is those seed-round projects that have raised funds in the market in 2022 but have nothing. Their valuations are still around 15 million US dollars. Of course, the premium of the blockchain industry is nothing The question is still very obvious, compared with ordinary equity financing, traditional Internet projects, etc. In fact, it is really rare for a smart contract platform project to be valued at 20 million at any point in time.

I've done so much foreshadowing, what I want to say is that the beginning of Solana is not very beautiful,first level title

What did Solana get right from 0 to 1?

So what did Solana do right in the first place? This point may be of great concern to many people.One point that I think is very important is that the founder’s Ego is very small, and the whole team has a very pragmatic style. They don’t have too many obsessions. To help the project gain more attention and approval for use, they will try whatever they want, and they will not be afraid of losing face and failing again.

The second is to get on the beta of the mainnet very quickly, and to get on many centralized trading platforms very quickly.In October 2019, at the 5th Devcon of Ethereum in Osaka, Anatoly stood in the developer hall every day for four consecutive days. He wore Solana clothes and hats, and then took the initiative to greet others and introduce Solana to people who came and went. At that time, few people who came and went paid attention to him. One day I chatted with him in the lobby for an hour and a half, but no one came to ask him questions, and no one came to say hello. He knew that such a propaganda method was very inefficient, but he didn't care. He said that anyway, there are not many people in this industry. It is a developer who can talk to one person, and a developer who can talk to a developer.

After the fundraising for validator nodes in 2019, Anatoly and Raj insisted on focusing on development and going to the mainnet first.Even with the label of beta, we must strive to go online as soon as possible. Kyle Samani, the co-founder of Multicoin Capital, put a lot of pressure on them at the time, saying that you must issue coins as soon as possible and go to the trading platform.

In some subsequent public talks,Kyle admitted that his own judgment of priorities at the time was not necessarily the most accurate.He admitted that Anatoly's decision to stick to the mainnet first is the most correct. But the reason why he actively promoted Solana on the trading platform at that time was that only when the chips are widely distributed in the hands of many people, the so-called people in the car, and the community begins to be discussed not only as a technology, but as a target, can it be Enables Solana to form a consensus.

Just like Kain Warwick, the founder of Synthetix, he mentioned in a podcast that he chose to develop on Ethereum because he had the chips to participate in Ethereum in the early stage. He has chips, so it is normal for the ass to decide the head. In fact, looking back at this point in time, both sides are right to insist, and they can even claim that these two points are the most important moves to lay the foundation for Solana.

The result of going to the mainnet first is that when Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was looking for a cooperative public chain everywhere, only Solana caught it, quickly launched the trading platform, and changed hands in the secondary market. On the one hand, it helped Solana accumulate market attention in 2020, but on the other hand, it also allowed more people to own the Solana token and accumulated its consensus. Kyle has a very famous saying - your market cap is your market publicity (Your marketcap is your brand).

For quite a few Western projects, he would claim that he didn't care about the price, and they felt that it was not technical to talk about money.But both Anatoly and Raj are very concerned about the market. They saw some counterexamples in the past and felt that if the market keeps falling, the people involved in the ecology will be depressed. Because after all, it is related to cost, so they discussed with all private equity investors before the public offering, and changed the unlocking time of each round to the same time. If they want to die, they will die once. If they die completely, they don’t need it Face this blunt knife with a monthly unlock.In fact, this move later became a classic case of capital-sufficient games with the joint support of some core institutions.

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That night, Solana took to a bigger stage

Speaking of this, many people are actually very curious about how FTX founder Sam Bankman fried (SBF) and Solana chose each other. The second is that after Solana has modified and unlocked, the wonderful game of various participants in the market.

Back to DeFi summer in 2020. Starting from May 2020, some of the earlier decentralized financial protocols on Ethereum began to skyrocket. The most typical one is AAVE in the early years. Today their team also made a social protocol Lens protocol, the vast majority of people in the market may not feel it, but SBF is very concerned about this capital flow. At that time, he had already realized the magic and momentum of decentralized finance. He wanted to find a suitable public chain at that time, and he wanted to build a trading platform for the order department.

If some listeners ask the core members of the Polygon, Avalanche and Near foundations, you will know that SBF had talked with all public chains with a little reputation in the market at that time, and he took the initiative to find them. Obviously Solana is not one of the well-known public chains. Then there were rumors in the market that FTX was most interested in Near at that time, but it would take some time for their mainnet to go live, but SBF didn't want to wait. Kyle from Multicoin found a way to introduce Anatoly to SBF after hearing the news. On July 16, 2020, at 2 o'clock in the morning in Beijing, something too important happened, so I always remember this time. Kyle typed us live: "I was on the phone with Sam, and it was only half an hour at first, but it has turned into a 3-hour meeting, and it's 3 o'clock on Sam's side (because he's in Hong Kong ), and will continue now. Sam very much agrees with Anatoly’s vision, which is to run a high-speed NASDAQ vision, and he is asking his engineers to participate in the investigation, and then asked some technical questions.”

Kyle was so excited while typing so fast, I could even feel his hands shaking.The next day Kyle told me at 1.5 times his average speed, Anatoly told him that in the early hours of the night, that is, during the daytime in Hong Kong time, there were a lot of spam attacks on the Solana chain, which was later verified. Sam asked his engineer to send it to test the performance of the Solana public chain. But Solana held on.

On the same day, SBF decided to invest in Solana, of course the terms of his deal are unknown to me. A few days later the design for Serum, FTX's own hatched decentralized order book matching engine, was born.

That night, Kyle tossed and turned in bed and couldn't sleep. He was so excited that he wrote Serum's investment memo. Everyone in Serum thought it was crazy, but those who believed it were true believers. So even at that time, Kyle was a very valuation sensitive person, and he decided to stud, which is very exaggerated. Then he typed us quickly on Slack: "I was just so excited about all these that are going to happen. For the whole week, I couldn't fall asleep. Solana is exactly designed for things like Serum, and they have the liquidity. This is just huge."

Add a background knowledge to our audience, that is, Multicoin has a strong obsession with the order department trading platform on the chain, because it is often said that the order department exchange model based on matching, when the liquidity allows, the capital efficiency is the highest of.

If you look at the investment portfolio on the Multicoin website, you can see that they have made a lot of financial investment attempts on the order book chain over the years. Without sufficient liquidity support, this thing is indeed a bit difficult to do. To quote what the ambassador and Wang Miao said in Three Body, "There must be a reason for wearing leather pants with cotton pants. Either the cotton pants lack cotton, or the leather pants lack hair." Solana's throughput combined with Alameda's liquidity is theoretically compatible.

After that exciting moment has passed, Solana is still facing the pressure of unlocking a huge amount of tokens in March 2021. The tokens of all private equity investors will be unlocked at one time. Ultimately, it is a game of mentality of the participants. This adjustment forces Unconfident private equity investors take the initiative to change hands before unlocking. According to some incomplete information I learned through many third-party OTCs, the basic transaction price of the second-hand contracts that changed hands at that time was between a few cents and 2 US dollars per SOL. My guess is that based on this point, SBF has the confidence to say that all SOLs below $3 can be sold to him.

More practically speaking, the circulating market value before unlocking was very low, and the futures funding rate was negative and very high. It means that the air force has to pay a very high fee every 8 hours to the multi-army. After the price rises, these multi-air forces will become the fuel of the multi-party, which means that if it is exploded, it will further increase the spot price. Because it is liquidated directly at the market price.

But we will not expand too much on the content of these transactions here.That Solana gained the momentum of the first wave is indeed inseparable for SBF and FTX participation.The participation mentioned here is divided into two types. One is that SBF will take the lead in incubating projects on it, and hold high the flag to tell everyone that they are also standing behind Solana. This really gave a lot of people confidence. In addition to Serum, FTX and Alameda are also incubating other projects, such as Raydium, the first automatic market-making decentralized trading platform on Solana, Oxygen, the first lending protocol, and the above Managed Bridge Sollet. Of course, Sollet itself is also a wallet, and all of them have issued public tokens on FTX. From the perspective of doing projects, these are not too successful. Raydium and Oxygen were quickly replaced by projects with better experience. But in the early days, from the perspective of promoting Solana, as an optional development ecology, they played a certain positive role.

In addition, many wallets and trading platforms were originally unwilling to connect to Solana. It is very simple, because if they want to connect to a non-EVM public chain, the additional engineering cost required is relatively high. Wallets and exchanges in Asia are particularly on the sidelines until analysts are unsure whether FTX will partner with Solana. It is difficult for Solana to get their support, because after spending resources, the ecology has not been developed, so it is not a loss?first level title

SBF and FTX give Solana legitimacy

It's hard to go from 0 to 1 with a flywheel, but once someone starts the flywheel, it gets easier and easier to go down.But more invisible and more deadly is the legitimacy that SBF brings to Solana. Need to spend a little time talking about how to understand this orthodoxy.In the western blockchain technology circles, there are some interesting identity recognition and political correctness. At the beginning, the biggest bitcoiners appeared, or bitcoin fundamentalism. These people entered the encryption ecology very early. Circle, they have a strong encryption spirit.

With Vitalik's Turing-complete Ethereum that can execute smart contracts, the largest Ethereum and Ethereum metaism have emerged. Bitcoin fundamentalism has a set of arguments with a higher position. The more typical one is that Bitcoin has a fixed upper limit, while Ethereum has unlimited additional issuance, or Ethereum has private placements. Obviously, if you talk about the advantages and disadvantages regardless of the function and purpose, it is all hooliganism. But this is 2016 and 2017. It is not a strange phenomenon, which mainly exists among fans of the early encryption spirit.

But after Ethereum gained a firm foothold, some people naturally questioned that the performance of Ethereum was not enough to support the demand that everything can be chained. They need to expand. Obviously, many things do not need to be chained.But the emergence of these high-performance scaling solutions, more or less active or passive, will be classified as Ethereum killers, and it becomes a politically opposing camp.

Just when the performance of Ethereum was questioned, I took the initiative to put on this killer hat, and the banner of these public chains became clear, which belongs to me, which is higher, faster and stronger than Ethereum. But in the same way, when the bubble dissipated and everyone found that the gimmicks of the high-performance supply chain were all over the place, the term Ethereum killer immediately became a derogatory term, and the status of the expanded public chain was immediately dwarfed. Everyone said that Ethereum is better, and the moral high ground of Ethereum fundamentalism has stood.

An interesting phenomenon is the various expansion schemes,At various times, they face very different community sentiments and politics, and the narratives that are rightly adopted are constantly changing.The most typical ones are Polygon and Near. Polygon told the story of the side chain in the early days, that is, I can do what Ethereum can't, but as the argument of the rivers and lakes becomes that the side chain is a vampire of Ethereum, the side chain is essentially the value that can enter the Ethereum network Capture shifted to their network, after this type of rhetoric. Polygon is very smart, they started to avoid talking about the fact that they are a side chain, and then turned to say that they intend to serve the Ethereum community deeply as a two-layer network. Near also uses a similar logic. Their founders are high-spirited, and they criticized Ethereum when they raised funds, and then regarded themselves as the archway of the Ethereum killer.

Of course, after the popularity of DeFi Summer in 2020, Near found that it is better to say that it is a second-tier network, which is easy to attract the Ethereum community and liquidity. But the fact is that neither of them is considered a second-tier network, which can at least pretend to be a second-tier network to get close to Ethereum. But for the Solana of the "high-performance public chain", he is not even compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine. The name of the Ethereum killer, whether they want to or not, they have to memorize. For a long time, the media and public opinion will impose on them.

In fact, in the eyes of many influential Ethereum core developers, Solana just doesn't do well. However, SBF's openness, inclusiveness, idealization, and pursuit of technology are very obvious, giving some strength to Solana, who lacks orthodoxy.It also made many people who hate Multicoin as Solana's largest investor begin to change their stereotypes.

After SBF publicly supported Solana, many investors who originally claimed to be Ethereum fundamentalists or those who looked down on Solana became tempted.For example, Santiago Roel Santos, a former partner of ParaFi Capital, is a typical example. He was really brainless before bragging about Ethereum, but later he began to be willing to recognize Solana.What I admire most is that Lily Liu, a Bitcoin fundamentalist, decided to join Solana as the chairman of the foundation.I really don’t know how Raj and Anatoly convinced her, but this milestone can be said to have changed the fundamentals of Solana, because many old encryption circles and Silicon Valley people recognize Lily very much, although she is on social networks There are not that many fans, but the core people recognize her very much, so he is willing to take this step, so many people will feel that they need to re-examine Solana and ask if they were too arrogant before.

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Attract great developers and become bigger and stronger

But how did Solana's larger developer ecosystem come about? After all, even if the developer ecology spends money, it must be spent in the correct way. It does not mean that if you have money, you will be able to develop the developer ecology organically. In fact, most of the native developers of Solidity on Ethereum do not have the ability of Rust, so Solana turned its attention to the developers of major technology companies. But Solana also understands that in order to attract these people, it needs to be very profitable, so that they can feel that the opportunity cost is worth it. Therefore, they should have spent a lot of effort in the circle of these people at that time, including recruiting some core developers from these big factories.

The second is that a group of Polkadot Rust developers turned to Solana at that time. What is interesting is that the launch of Polkadot, the king-level public chain that everyone has been looking forward to, has been postponed again and again. Secondly, some smaller developers feel that they do not have the financial ability to participate in the card slot auction, so it is better to try a Solana ecosystem that has no financial threshold and can make money, and is supported by big donors.

In this context, Solana launched a well-planned hackathon, which is also a fairly classic case. Their first issue was done in October 2020, and investors and founders from all over the world were convened as judges. What impresses me deeply is that Stani Kulechov, the founder of AAVE, is also there, because the others are not based on the Ethereum ecosystem. Compared with Compound, a competitor located in Silicon Valley, AAVE is actually more tolerant.

The first prize pool is not particularly large, less than 200,000 USDC. Take a look at today's Ethereum New York Hackathon. They have very famous project sponsors from all over the world, and the total prize pool is only 500,000 US dollars. Solana has a bonus of 200,000 US dollars for the first time, which should be considered good. The second phase is in February 2021. Solana and Serum conducted a hackathon specifically for decentralized finance projects. What I find interesting is that the Solana and Serum teams have written a very detailed idea list, which includes all kinds of tools and applications that they think are needed on Solana but not yet available. They encourage everyone to develop based on that list, and then return it to the independent The contestants are offered the opportunity to match teams.

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The Flywheel Effect Takes Solana Soaring — 4 Turning Points

At this stage, the huge efforts Solana has invested in the developer ecosystem can be said to have begun a positive cycle.Then it will be more radical in 2022. They will hold short-term flash mob events specially organized for developers in various places in the United States, Europe, and Asia at different times. They call it Hacker House Series. 

Solana lets its core developers and business people fly to different cities, and invites local developers and interested investors to their prepared venues for exchanges, on-site Q&A, business development, and even investment negotiations. At this moment, at this moment, Solana is no longer the little brother who begged developers to come in 2020. He is now playing the role of a big brother, and we must ensure that everyone who comes here will eat and have fun. , to match the resources you need.

The developments described above sound smooth, but in fact no public chain will not pay attention to hackathons, especially the previous two and three hackathons. Before there is a decent ecology, the challenges are huge. The Solana business team made a lot of contributions in the early days. It is very difficult for any hacker to participate only by natural traffic before the flywheel starts to spin. Therefore, their business teams need to find ways to find these excellent teams, and even persuade Alameda Ventures and some deeply bound institutions to invest, or introduce a series of resources to these teams for free, as a way to attract these teams to unify on Solana Chips developed.

Another point, an important factor that people tend to overlook is that the Solana team has used the power of FTX to get USDC and USDT to recognize and integrate them. He personally participated in the event, and promised Jeremy to support Solana immediately from the perspective of FTX and Serum.Of course, Jeremy himself recognizes Anatoly's vision very much. It goes without saying that Tether's USDT has penetrated into third world countries. When Solana announced that Tether supported them on the day, Solana directly jumped 60 points that day.

When a public chain has a stable currency, the decentralized finance on it will be easier to develop, it will be easier to attract users to use these financial applications, and it will further motivate developers to develop more applications here.Gradually there are developers and applications, and with stablecoins, users are not a matter of course. In addition to caring about how the Solana developer ecosystem is built,I believe that there are still many people who are concerned about how some people are willing to use Solana, because you have the supply side, and it doesn’t make sense if you don’t have the consumption side. Some people will say that the first batch of users attracted by an ecology are often speculators, so it is very important to have the first reaction to start making money, such as the launch of Raydium, etc. This is very important.

I don't deny the importance of this point, but in fact, everyone will find that because Solana's transaction fees are very low, the liquidity mining smart contract that capital on the chain is keen on generates more money through risky deposits. This kind of bubble behavior of money is very easy to mine disasters on Solana, that is, it is overwhelmed by the high-frequency mining and selling of funds. If a mine does not do well from the beginning to the end, it will die soon, or even less than a day.

In my opinion, one of the biggest turning points should be that the Phantom team decided to make a silky smooth wallet on top of Solana.The background of the Phantom team is the Silicon Valley product 0x, an old decentralized financial agreement on Ethereum, with a minimalist style. Compared with the earlier Solana wallets such as Sollet, which everyone suffered at the time, it is indeed refreshing. On the eve of the explosion of the decentralized financial protocol on Solana, Phantom was born, and it should be said that it perfectly caught a wave of traffic. As an important front end for interacting with the protocol, the wallet's user experience largely determines the next user's behavior.I even think that there is no way to cultivate a silky browser wallet, mobile wallet, is a decisive event for a public chain to gain large-scale application, and then Phantom is this browser wallet.

Then the second turning point came from the appearance of Magic Eden. Before the emergence of Magic Eden, Solana had no real NFT community at all,All the small pictures are imitation things on Ethereum. Similar to Phantom, Magic Eden's core team also has a background in Silicon Valley and Google, plus dYdX, another established decentralized financial association, from their launch to the Solana market, it took less than two months for the NFT market share to reach 90%. Almost at the Breakpoint conference in 2021, they have already achieved 90%.

They have a very strong business and community operation team, which can be said to have built the entire Solana NFT ecosystem from 0 to 1 from scratch. Before the rise of Magic Eden, many of the projects on Solana were imitated from Ethereum, and there was no real native creator community.

Then it's actually STEPN. Many Solana users who have never been exposed to the blockchain have learned about Solana through STEPN registration.Mobile wallet is an event that determines the public chain or large-scale application. If Phantom is a browser wallet, I think STEPN's mobile wallet is also an important part. Among the 5 million registered users of STEPN, almost 30% are brand-new users outside the circle, which means that they are not non-Solana but native users of the non-encryption circle. Many NFT users who are active in the Solana ecosystem today also said that they came into contact with Solana because of STEPN, a fitness app.

I also want to try to answer another question through these observations, that is, where does Solana go when FTX crashes today?

In fact, you may already know my answer to this question.Solana probably won't die, but it won't live the way it used to.

On November 10, 2022, the Solana Foundation posted a clarification article on the official blog, which provided many details about how they were affected by FTX’s bankruptcy and liquidation, including Alameda and FTX’s previous investment in SOL, as well as Sollet’s custody Assets on the cross-chain bridge, etc.

The former COO Raj, the co-founder of Solana, tweeted a paragraph on December 29. He said that in the past few years, our active and passionate community has been affected by some short-term and short-sighted hype , then they are like this harmful virus that needs to be cleaned up. Fever is painful of course, but you're happy when it flares up and you know they'll be over soon, and that's the last pain. After any bad element is washed out by this, it is actually a solid step on the road to more decentralization.

But what he said at the end, I think although it sounds clichéd, it’s completely fine to put on Solana, because it’s not like anything can kill the bad guy to bring him back to life, maybe you’ll die completely up. But Solana probably won’t, because it has experienced a lot of ups and downs. Even if it changes from the market level, it has changed a lot of batches, and then there are still more organic developers.The downfall of a core institution may become an important opportunity for it to develop towards a more decentralized perspective. This must be very painful, but I think it is also an opportunity.

Many people questioned that with the price drop, these validator nodes Validators began to unstake, and the security of the chain may be lost. Small developers must be very worried, because the threshold for validator nodes is very high. It is also impossible for developers to run nodes as they want, which is unrealistic. But from the perspective of big developers, this hidden cost of re-acquiring and cultivating communities for their migration may be more fatal.

For example, developers like Magic Eden or STEPN, they may actually run verification nodes themselves, trying to make this chain truly a public blockchain. For a smart contract platform, the most important thing is whether the developer ecosystem is organic and spontaneous, and whether users have a sense of community identity.

A while ago, I saw that Silicon Valley's venture capital firm Eletric Capital released its annual developer research report. In December 2022, one month after the fall of FTX, the number of active developers of Solana is second only to Ethereum in all public chain ecosystems, with 2082, an increase of 83% compared with the same period in 2021. FTX, SBF, and big investors played a key role in Solana's obscurity to popularity. But on the road starting in early 2022, perhaps Solana has already started to walk by itself.

reference link

reference link

The financing situation of each public chain on Messari:

Polygon: https://messari.io/asset/polygon/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution

Avalanche: https://messari.io/asset/avalanche/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution

Near: https://messari.io/asset/near-protocol/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution

Solana: https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution

Multicoin Capital Portfolio: https://multicoin.capital/portfolio/

Solana Hackathon Related Links:

The first hackathon: https://solana.com/de/wormhole-hackathon
The 2nd Hackathon: https://solana.blog/2000-participating-in-solana-defi-hackathon-kicking-off-tomorrow/
The things that need to be built on Solana made by the Serum team are for reference for those who participate in the hackathon: https://serum-academy.com/en/serum-project-ideas/project-ideas/ (the link has expired)
The 3rd Hackathon: https://solana.blog/solana-season-global-hackathon-with-1 m-prize-and-funding-pool/
The 4th Hackathon: https://solana.blog/katana-wins-out-of-568-projects-launched-in-massive-solana-ignition-hackathon/
The Fifth Hackathon: https://solana.blog/solana-riptide-hackathon/
Prize pool for ETH NYC: https://nyc.ethglobal.co/#prizes
Solana Foundation’s clarification on assets linked to FTX/Alameda: https://solana.com/news/solana-facts-ftx-bankruptcy
Raj's Twitter: https://twitter.com/rajgokal/status/1608320254463348736
Original link

Original link