Solana: A lot of chance and a little of necessity

本文转录自  STEPN 首席营收官、  Multicoin Capital 前合伙人 Mable 的播客 HODLong 后浪，如需收听原播客，Please click the link

在 FTX 宣布破产之后，被其全力支持的 Solana 公链遭到重创，陷入困境：公链代币 SOL 价格大跌，从高点 100 美元跌至不足 10 美元（当前已回升至 22 美元）；链上 TVL 较历史高点跌近 98%；随后还在今年 2 月出现长达 48 小时的宕机情况，却无人发现。面对用户量大幅流失、节点罢工，甚至包括知名 NFT 项目 DeGods、y00ts 的离开，Solana 基金会的努力看起来如此无力。曾经风光一时、最有望成为 「以太坊杀手」 的 Solana 公链如今陷入了无人问津的处境。 

Solana's ties to FTX may be one reason for its success, but they are not inevitable.This article is compiled fromSTEPN 首席营收官、  Multicoin Capital 前合伙人  Mable's podcast, released in January 2023, was both a success and a failure for Solana's big investor, Multicoin Capital.

Through this article, we review the ups and downs of this king public chain. Just as FTX is reopening, perhaps Solana will one day regroup and enter the fray again.

Highlights of this issue

What is Solana's background?

What did Solana do right from zero to one?

How did SBF and Solana choose each other?

What changes has SBF brought to Solana?

How does Solana's developer ecosystem work?

How did Solana get started?

Now that FTX has collapsed, where does Solana go from here?

前阵子有朋友就说，你怎么没有从来没有聊过 Solana，我说这个话题太大了。然后有朋友说特别感兴趣 Solana 从最早 18 年 19 年到现在是怎么做起来的，还有 FTX、 Sam 和 Solana 是怎么相互选择的，还有价格奇迹，这些其实都是在 2020 年和 2021 年被大家津津乐道，又从来没有人聊过的事情。 没有聊 Solana 是因为一直没有找到合适的人对谈，不管是生态里的任何一块，能聊的东西都挺多的。但是其实今天 Solana 已经成为科技行业多多少少都会有所耳闻的一个名字，既然找不到一个合适的人，那我决定做一期自己的节目。

The story of Solana's birth

Anatoly Yakovenko，一个乌克兰裔的前高通工程师，他在 2018 年初叫上十几年的老朋友 Raj Gokal，也就是后来 Solana 的 COO，一起创立了 Solana。Anatoly 后来还邀请了他在高通的老板加入 Solana。 

When he first approached Turing's complete blockchain, he wanted to build an on-chain order desk trading platform. What Turing meant by complete was Ethereum on which smart contracts could be compiled, and he realized very quickly that Ethereum was not capable of handling on-chain transactions of that volume, so he decided to build his own smart contract platform, but found that the infrastructure was not, so he decided to build his own infrastructure. One night Anatoly, after drinking three cups of coffee and tossing and turning, got up and wrote the original Solana code, and that was the story of how Solana was born.

Solana's difficult fundraising phase

Nineteen years ago, the Wanxiang Blockchain Conference was held in Shanghai. People from all over the world flocked to the conference. If the project wanted to gain voice or exposure, it would go to Shanghai and Hangzhou in the summer. Even during the worst of the bear market, China was a fertile ground for activity. At that time, Chinese capital still had a considerable say in the blockchain industry, and project parties were willing to come to China for financing. Solana came to China to raise money. I remember clearly that they held events from Beijing to Shanghai to Seoul, telling people what Solana was and why they were doing it. Foreign projects are usually very busy at the time of financing. Even in the evening, you may try to arrange to cultivate relationships with some investors.  

Anatoly and Raj, along with Chief scientist Eric Williams, and Dom, a community operator they recruited early on Discord or Telegram and are now veterans, were on this fundraising trip to Asia. In fact, they've tried to raise money in China, Korea and Japan, but they haven't been very successful, I should say, they've hit a wall, and partly because their stories aren't that great, Chinese investors aren't buying it.So a lot of the time they have to invite the few friends they know 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, all the ground, so we were very incredulous. Secondly, because of the bear market, everyone kept their money in their pockets cautiously. I didn't work at Multicoin Capital at that time, so I spent a lot of time surfing and learning on the Internet during the day, and then I met with Raj when overseas projects came to China for road shows. Anatoly spent the night drinking together. I was impressed that Anatoly preferred to drink his whisky neat. Obviously, if they could find other investors who would talk to them, they probably wouldn't talk to me all the time.  

When I got to know the team, I had a very sensitive understanding of Solana. I'm sure I can't do absolute justice, just give my side of the story.

Solana's History -- Modest beginnings

所以我跟大家从我角度聊聊 Solana 是怎么起来的，和一些起起伏伏。首先我觉得第一个话题是很多人关心的 Solana 从 0 到 1 做对了什么事情。

Talking about their modest beginnings, Solana was never a team born with a silver spoon in their mouth. There's a layer of smart contract platforms that are currently active, or that everybody's talking about, which we call public chains. Solana may have the lowest level of primary funding in history for a non-EVM-compatible public chain, including a private placement plus a public offering.

While working on this show, I suddenly thought of the Polygon team, which was actually more difficult than Solana at the time. How hard is it? When JD, their original founder, went out to raise money in '18, the Ethereum side chain was, I should say, all over the place, and a lot of people questioned their security and felt insecure, plus the team was unimpressive.JD English has a strong Indian accent and no one even wants to vote for him. So before they launched Binance Launchpad, Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures invested in them, thinking, "What if?" and "What if?" they did. Combined, the two probably put in less than $1 million.

Later, I checked on Messari and found that their public offering of $5 million sold tokens of 18 points. It was hard to imagine, because equity financing and currency rights financing were very different, so any project only sold 18% tokens to one institution, which was absolutely amazing. There are some projects where it might only be 15 percent of the team. Of course, the 18% token was given to traders on Binance, so it was distributed to the community, but that's almost unimaginable today.  

There's also some Rollup groups, like Optimism, like StarkWare, that raised a lot of money because they had legitimacy, which is kind of interesting. These side chain teams, or some of the Rollup teams, they don't have any direct value capture to the Ethereum network, so they're sort of a Tier 1 smart contract platform, of course, because they're all backed by Tier 2 networks. This is their narrative, and we won't go into it here.

Since I was talking about this topic, I went to find some data on Solana versus other public chains that are still active, which you can refer to, also from Messari.  

First up, the Avalanche Deal, which raised $6 million in its first round in February 2019, was founded by a guy named Emin Gun Sirer, who's been around a long time in cryptography. November 2018 was the deep bear of the last cycle, when bitcoin fell to 3,000, but three months later they were able to raise $6 million, which is pretty impressive. Then before the first wave of DeFi Summer started in June 2020, they raised another $12 million, all private. After a month, they raised $37.5 million in the public offering, for a total of $55.5 million in the primary market.

In fact, the Near team was very active in China in the period of 17-19. In the third quarter of 2017, before the peak of the bull market, they had raised $810,000, then raised $2.88 million in the third quarter of 18, and raised $8.48 million in the first quarter of 19. Then $375,000 was raised in the second quarter of the same year, for a total of $12 million. In early 2020, they completed A round of financing of more than 21 million yuan.  

Later, there were some technical problems in the public offering. The total amount of public offering exceeded 30 million dollars, because he did not have a very specific financing record, but the total amount was more than 30 million dollars, so the total amount of private and public offering was 63 million dollars.  

If you look at Solana, it closed a $3.17 million seed round in April of '18, raised $12.6 million in June of that same year, and in July of' 19 it had a $5.7 million verifier node called Validator Sales, In February 2020, they raised $2.3 million ahead of the public offering, which was a little more expensive than the public offering. They later closed $1.76 million in financing. So they raised $25.53 million from the private + public offering. Compare that to the $63 million raised by the Near team and the $25.53 million raised by the Solana team. What do I think is funny? Even if they write the amount of Bitcoin and Ethereum in each round of financing information, there are very strong characteristics of the last cycle.  

I think there may be a lot of similar situations in Near and Avalanche, because Near started financing in 2017 and Solana in 2018, but the financing information of Near has not been released, Solana is more realistic and has released all the financing information. In the era of ICO, in fact, everyone is more used to taking Ethereum Bitcoin financing, the object of financing is the application protocol on Ethereum. Other smart contract platform teams may follow suit, even if they're not built on top of Ethereum. At that time, many teams did not have the concept of financial management. When money was raised, they just kept it. When the bear market came, Ethereum bitcoin would fall sharply. So I have a feeling that even though he said he had raised more than $25 million, they probably didn't have that much money when they actually used it.

Solana has been questioned

Solana 的几个联合创始人，都属于非典型的区块链项目的创始人，和当时 17 年 18 年比较多投资机构追捧的一些项目相比，Solana 团队都是从硅谷大厂出来，中年创业开始创业的团队。Anatoly 都已经有 3 个孩子了，他们既没有像 V 神这种非常厉害的天才少年架构师，也没有非常闪耀的背景，也没有一些拥有非常强的学术背景，比如说 Avalanche 的创始人都属于这种。

From the perspective of the team background, they are regarded as second - and third-rate by many investors.This has some similarities to the Polygon team mentioned earlier. Anatoly is a very down-to-earth guy, he doesn't like to talk big, and he's a shy type offline. Raj Gokal didn't know anything about marketing storytelling until he became COO. In the early days, some of the investors and their employees privately doubted Raj's ability to become the second most important person on the project, and some of the big early investors even tried to watch him, feeling that if he wasn't capable, it was necessary to ask the team to replace him. Of course there is no such thing as governance rights in the financing of tokens, there is no such thing as board seats. It's more about pure influence between people. It doesn't matter whether the team listens or not when investors pressure them.  

Around the time the Solana team raised money in China, they also went to various mining pools and sent graphics cards to those pools, which were mined for POW coins like bitcoin Ethereum and required them to sort blocks. The pool they were looking for included the largest Ethereum pool in the world at the time. Of course, the mine has now been closed in accordance with relevant laws and regulations. Later, the people in the mine pool told me that they tried to run Solana's node, but the WiFi in their office was down, so they gave up, and there was no further participation in the verifier node.

Many will argue that Solana's Proof of History is a gimmicky attempt to impose a new consensus algorithm beyond proof of equity and proof of work. For those of you who understand, history is not actually a new consensus algorithm. Solana's consensus algorithm is still Proof of Stake, and the main task of historical proof is to solve the confirmation problem of the transaction timestamp on the chain under high throughput.  

Essentially, all event transactions on Solana nodes are hashed using the SHA256 hash function, which takes an input and produces a unique output that is very unpredictable. Solana chain takes the output of the transaction and uses it as the input for the next hash. The hashing process confirms a continuous chain of crypto transactions, or a clear, verifiable order of transactions on the chain. In layman's terms, Solana is the first block before the consensus. Of course, since the purpose of today's podcast is not to discuss the technical merits of Solana, I'm here to provide background information, mainly to show that at the time, people were not very trusting of Solana's series of narratives.

At first Anatoly felt that this narrative was a great, glorious, right thing to do, but the fact that this high performance public chain story has probably been heard a lot in Asia is that it's just hype. Many people will argue that there aren't many applications that can use blockchain in the first place, so high performance public chains are a pseudo-proposition.At that time, the price of Solana was very low, which is hard to believe today. The first round of valuation of Solana was $20 million, then the second round was 100 million, the verifier node round was 112 million, and the last round of strategic private placement was 122 million.  

What is a $20 million valuation? By the end of 2021, Aptos, which is very popular recently, is not coin option financing but equity financing, and it is already at $1 billion, then its coin option mapping may be more expensive, because it is not 1:1, if the price of the equity is already 50 times. 20 million versus 1 billion, probably the most is Aptos main network online from this point in time, it is a little short, but not much short.  

I think another reference frame for comparison is those seed round projects that have raised funds but have nothing in the market in 2022. Their valuation is still around 15 million dollars. Of course, the premium of the blockchain industry is undoubtedly still very significant, compared with ordinary equity financing and traditional Internet projects. In fact, at any point in time to do smart contract platform project valuation of 20 million is really rare.

All I want to say is that Solana doesn't start off very well,Their chances of winning from a capital market perspective are not very significant. Not to mention that Solana's early investors were few and far between. At that time, Multicoin was a second-rate player in the US and unknown elsewhere.

What did Solana do right from zero to one?

So what did Solana do right from the beginning? This is something that probably matters to a lot of people.In my opinion, one important point is that the Ego of the founder is very small, and the whole team is very pragmatic. They don't have too much obsession, they don't feel that they have to have a set of things as a Bible, and they will try whatever can help the project gain more attention and approval. They are not afraid of losing face and failing again.  

The second is very quickly on the main web Beta, very quickly on a number of centralized trading platforms.In October 2019, at the 5th annual Ethereum Devcon in Osaka, Anatoly stood in the developer hall every day for four days, donning a Solana suit and hat, and greeting people and introducing Solana to people who were barely paying attention. One day I spent an hour and a half with him in the lobby, and no one came to ask him a question or say hello. He knew it was inefficient, but he didn't mind. He said that this industry is not a few people, can talk about a is a, can talk about a developer is a developer.  

After the Validation Node fundraising closes in 2019, Anatoly and Raj are insisting that they focus on developing Mainnet first.Try to go live as soon as possible, even with the beta tag. Kyle Samani, the co-founder of Multicoin Capital, put a lot of pressure on them, saying you have to issue coins and get on the platform as soon as possible.  

In later public conversations,Kyle admits that his own perception of priorities may not have been the most accurate.He admitted Anatoly's decision to stick with the main net was the right one. But the reason he was pushing Solana's platform at the time was that it would only be possible for Solana to build consensus if the chips were widely distributed among many people, so-called people in cars, and the community started to be talked about not just as a technology but as an object.  

As Kain Warwick, the founder of Synthetix, said in a podcast that he chose to develop on Ethereum because he had leverage in the early days of Ethereum. He had leverage, so his ass decided his head was fine. It's not wrong to look back on both sides at this point in time and even claim that these two were the most important moves in Solana's foundation.  

As a result, when Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, looked around for a partner, only Solana picked it up, quickly launched the trading platform and switched hands in the secondary market. On the one hand, it helps Solana accumulate market attention in 2020, but on the other hand, it also enables more people to own the Solana token and accumulate its consensus. Kyle is famous for saying that Your marketcap is your brand.

For a lot of Western projects, he would claim that he doesn't care about the price, so they think that talking about money is not technical.But Anatoly and Raj were very concerned about the disk. They saw some counter examples in the past and felt that if the disk kept falling, everyone involved in the ecosystem would be depressed. After all, this is related to cost, which is why they discussed with all private investors before the public offering to change the unlocking time of each round to the same time. They can die once if they want to, and they don't need to face the dull knife unlocking every month.Then this move in fact, under the common help of some core institutions, it should be said that it became a classic case of full capital game.  

All of this is intended to give some background information to the audience, since most of you have probably been paying attention since FTX decided to get deeply involved in Solana. One would think Solana would never have made it this far if she hadn't been lucky enough to cling to FTX's thigh. I think this view is quite reasonable, but we should not ignore some details behind this so-called lucky.

That night, Solana took the big stage

说到这个其实挺多人都非常好奇，当时 FTX 的创始人 Sam Bankman fried（SBF）和 Solana 是怎么互相选择的。其次就是 Solana 修改了解锁后，市场上面各种各样参与者的精彩的博弈。

Back in the DeFi summer of 2020, starting in May 2020, some of Ethereum's earlier decentralized financial protocols started to explode. The most typical one is AAVE. Today, their team also made a social protocol Lens protocol. Most people in the market may not feel it, but SBF is concerned about this flow of money. He had already realized the magic and momentum of decentralized finance, and he wanted to find a suitable public chain. He wanted to build an order department trading platform.  

If you ask Polygon, Avalanche, and Near Foundation members, you'll know that SBF talked to every company in the market that was even a bit famous, and he came to them. Solana is clearly not part of this well-known public chain. Then the rumor in the market at the time was that FTX was the most interested in Near, but it would be some time before their main net came online, but SBF didn't want to wait. Kyle at Multicoin found out about this and managed to get someone else to introduce Anatoly to SBF. On July 16, 2020, at 2 o 'clock in the morning in Beijing, something very important happened, so I always remember this time. Kyle typed for us live: "I was on the phone with Sam, and it started out as a half-hour meeting, but it turned into a three-hour meeting, and it was 3 o 'clock (because he was in Hong Kong), and now it's going to continue. Sam really endorsed Anatoly's vision for a high speed NASDAQ, and he's getting his engineers involved in the investigation and asking some technical questions."  

Kyle was so excited as he typed quickly that I could feel his hand shaking.The next day Kyle told me in his 1.5 times faster voice that Anatoly had told him that there had been a massive spam attack on the Solana chain during the wee hours of their night, which was daytime Hong Kong time. It turned out that Sam had asked his engineers to send it to test the Solana public chain. But Solana held her own.  

That same day, SBF decided to invest in Solana, but the terms of his deal are unclear to me. A few days later came the design of Serum, FTX's own decentralized orderbook matching engine.  

That night, Kyle, tossing and turning in bed, was so excited that he wrote the investment memo for Serum, which everyone thought was crazy, but those who believed in it really believed in it. So even at that point, Kyle was a very sensitive person about valuation, and he decided to say he wanted to soha, which was a big exaggeration. Then he was typing away at us 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. "  And they have the liquidity. This is just huge." & NBSP;  

To add a bit of background for our audience, Multicoin is obsessed with the on-chain order desk trading platform, because it is often said that the match-based order desk exchange model is the most efficient when liquidity is allowed.  

If you look at the portfolio on Multicoin, you'll see that over the years they've done a lot of experimenting with financial investments on the order book chain, and it's a little difficult to do without enough liquidity to support it. To quote the ambassador and Wang Miao from the Three-Body Agency, "There must be a reason why leather pants wear cotton pants. Either the cotton pants lack cotton or the leather pants lack hair." Solana's throughput is matched by Alameda's liquidity, which is theoretically compatible.

After that exciting moment, Solana was still facing the pressure of unlocking a large number of tokens in March 2021. All the tokens of private investors were unlocked at one time. Ultimately, it was a game of mentality of participants, and this adjustment forced private investors without confidence to actively change hands before unlocking. According to the incomplete information I learned through many third-party OTCs, the basic transaction price of second-hand contracts changed hands at that time was between a few cents and $2 per SOL. My guess is that SBF was confident enough to say that SOL could be sold to him for less than $3.  

More realistically, the market value before unlocking was very low, and the capital rate of futures was very high and negative. It means that the air force has to pay a very high price for every eight hours of the multiple forces, and when the parity is built up, the multiple forces become the fuel for the multiple forces, which means that if it's blown up, it's going to further inflate the spot price, because it's going to liquidate at market prices.  

But we won't go into the details of these transactions too much here.So Solana's first wave of momentum really suits SBF and FTX's involvement.这里说的参与分为两种，一种是 SBF 会带头在上面孵化项目，高举旗帜告诉大家他们也站在了 Solana 的背后。这个确实给了不少人信心，除了 Serum 外，FTX 和 Alameda 也在孵化其他项目，例如 Solana 上面第一个自动做市的去中心化交易平台 Raydium，第一个借贷协议 Oxygen，还有上面的托管桥 Sollet。当然 Sollet 本身也是一个钱包，它们全都在 FTX 上面进行了公募的代币发行，从做项目的角度来说，这些都不能算是太成功。Raydium、Oxygen 很快都被体验更好的项目取代了。但在早期，从宣传 Solana 的角度，作为一个可选择的开发生态的角度，他们起到了一定的积极作用。

In addition, many wallets and trading platforms were originally reluctant to connect to Solana, quite simply, because if you want to connect to a non-EVM public chain, the additional engineering cost is relatively high. Wallets and trading platforms in Asia were particularly on the fence until they were unsure whether FTX would strike a deal with Solana. It's hard for Solana to get their support, because after the resources are spent, the ecology doesn't do it. Isn't that a loss?But when they saw FTX's rapid action, they all changed their tune.

SBF and FTX give Solana legitimacy

飞轮从 0 到 1 是很难的，但是一旦有人给飞轮开了这个头，往下转就变得越来越容易。But what's more stealthy and deadly is the legitimacy that SBF gives Solana. We need to spend a little bit of time talking about how we understand this legitimacy.In the western blockchain technology circle, there are some interesting identity identification and political correctness. In the beginning, there emerged the largest bitcoin, or bitcoin fundamentalism. These people have entered the crypto ecosystem early, and they have a strong crypto spirit.

With Vitalik's Turing-complete, smart contract-executing Ethereum, came the largest Ethereum and Ethereum fundamentalism. Bitcoin fundamentalism has a more advanced argument, typically that bitcoin has a fixed cap and Ethereum has unlimited issuance, or that Ethereum has private placements. Obviously, to talk about pros and cons without function or purpose is to be a gangster. But that's 2016 and 2017, not a strange phenomenon, mostly among early crypto enthusiasts.

But as Ethereum took hold, naturally, there were questions that Ethereum wasn't strong enough to allow everything to be connected, and they needed to scale up, and obviously a lot of things didn't need to be connected.But the emergence of these high-performance scaling solutions, which are more or less actively or passively categorized as Ethereum killers, has become a politically opposing camp. 

When the performance of ethereum was questioned, the initiative to put on the killer hat, the banner of these public chains will be clear, belong to me higher, faster and stronger than ethereum. But equally, when the bubble deflated and the hype of a high-performance supply chain faded, the term Ethereum killer became a pejorative and the public chain was dwarfed. The moral high ground of Ethereum fundamentalism was established when people said that Ethereum was better.

One of the things that's interesting about this is the variety of capacity expansion options,Over time, they face vastly different community moods and politics, and the correct narrative to adopt is constantly changing.The most typical examples are Polygon and Near. Polygon was early on telling the story of side chains, that I can do what Ethereum can't, but as the rhetoric became that side chains were Ethereum vampires, that side chains were essentially taking the value capture that could go into the Ethereum network and transferring it to their network, things like that. Polygon was smart enough to start avoiding the fact that it was a side chain, and then move on to saying that it intended to serve the Ethereum community as a layer 2 network. Near also uses similar logic. Its founder, in high spirits, criticized Ethereum when raising money, and then put his own Ethereum killer archway on hold.  

Of course, after the popularity of DeFi Summer 2020, Near found that it was better to call itself a tier 2 network, which attracted the Ethereum community and liquidity. But the fact that neither of them is a layer 2 network at least allows them to pretend to be close to Ethereum. But for Solana, the "high performance public chain", who is not even compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine, the name Ethereum killer, whether they like it or not, they will have to learn. For a long time, the media and public opinion will impose on them.

In the eyes of many developers at the influential core of Ethereum, Solana just doesn't do it right. However, SBF's open, inclusive, idealized and technology-seeking personalization obviously gives some strength to Solana, which lacks legitimacy.It also caused many people who hated Multicoin as Solana's biggest investor to change their stereotypes.  

Following the SBF's public support for Solana, many investors who had previously described themselves as fundamentalist Ethereum investors or those who did not like Solana began to be attracted.Santiago Roel Santos, a former partner at ParaFi Capital, is a case in point. He was really a brainless proponent of Ethereum, but has since become willing to endorse Solana.What impressed me most was Lily Liu, also a bitcoin fundamentalist, who decided to join Solana as the president of the foundation.I'm not really sure how Raj and Anatoly convinced her, but this milestone was a fundamental game-changer for Solana, because a lot of the older crypto community and Silicon Valley folks really recognized Lily, even though she didn't have a huge following on social media, but the core people really recognized her. So his willingness to take this step will make many feel they need to take a second look at Solana and ask if they might have been too arrogant.

People break the circle of things is actually very subtle, sometimes or most of the time depends on the influence of a few people, suddenly can make more people put down their stereotypes to review a thing.

Attract good developers and become bigger and stronger

但 Solana 更大的开发者生态是怎么做起来的？毕竟开发者生态即使是花钱，也得用正确的方式去花，并不是说有钱就一定能把开发者生态有机的做起来。以太坊上面的 Solidity 原生开发者其实大多数都没有 Rust 的能力，因此 Solana 将目光转向了科技公司大厂的开发者。但 Solana 也明白要吸引这些人，需要这事儿非常赚钱，才能让他们觉得这个机会成本是值得的。因此当时他们在这些人的圈子里面应该是花了大功夫的，包括从这些大厂里面去招一些核心开发者。 

The second was that a number of Poca developers were migrating to Solana at the time, and it was interesting to note that the long-awaited launch of Poca, the King of the public chain, was delayed over and over again. Second, smaller developers feel that they don't have the financial resources to participate in slot auctions, so it's better to try a Solana ecosystem with no financial threshold and the potential to make money, backed by big donors.  

It is against this backdrop that Solana has launched a well-curated hackathon, which is a fairly classic example. Their first installment, in October 2020, brought together investors and founders from around the world as judges. What impressed me was that Stani Kulechov, AAVE's founder, was there, as none of the others were Compound in the Ethereum ecosystem. AAVE was actually more tolerant than its rival Compound in Silicon Valley.  

The first prize pool was not particularly large, less than 200,000 USDC. If you look at today's Ethereum Hackathons in New York, they have very famous projects from all over the world sponsoring them, and the total prize pool is only $500,000. Solana got $200,000 for the first time, which is probably not bad. The second phase, in February 2021, will see Solana and Serum make a hackathon specifically for decentralized finance projects. What I found interesting was that the Solana and Serum teams wrote a very detailed list of all the tools and applications that they thought Solana needed but didn't yet have, encouraged development based on that list, and then offered the opportunity for independent contestants to match teams.  

I think the table is really too detailed. The timing is very good. They are also the time when investors unlock and private equity investors unlock, so it should be said that this kind of good news and private equity hedge well. And by October 2021, the third Hackathon prize pool was almost over $1 million. In addition to Solana Foundation, they all participated in sponsoring the award pool for all the projects that grew in the Solana ecosystem in that year, and the judges participated in it were unprecedented. Before this year's Hackathons started, these indie developers were convinced that if I participated in Solana Hackathons and ranked, I would gain community attention and investor funding at the same time. Even after the hackathon ended, Solana gave tickets to each of the winning teams to the developer conference and invited them to Lisbon to meet with developers and investors in person.

The Flywheel Effect makes Solana soar -- four turning points

到这个阶段，Solana 在开发者生态里面所投入的巨大努力，可以说已经开始正向循环。And then in 2022, they got even more aggressive, holding a Series of flash MOBS for developers at different times across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, called the Hacker House Series.  

Solana flies its core developers and business people to different cities, inviting local developers and interested investors to their prepared venues for networking, Q&A sessions, 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, but now plays the role of a big brother who wants to ensure that everyone comes to eat well and match the resources they need.  

All of this sounds like a great development, but the reality is that no company is going to ignore Hackathons, especially the first two or three hackathons, and the challenges are huge before there is a decent ecosystem. The Solana Business team contributed so much in the early days that it's very difficult for any hackathon to participate on natural traffic before the flywheel turns. So their business team had to find these great teams, even convincing Alameda Ventures and some deeply tied institutions to invest in them, or introducing them to a range of resources for free as leverage to get them to work on Solana together.  

Another important factor that is often overlooked is that the Solana team used FTX to get the USDC and then the USDT to endorse and integrate them, SBF personally reached out to Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Anatoly and USDC's parent company Circle, at the first meeting, which he himself attended, to confirm Jeremy's immediate support for Solana from the perspective of FTX and Serum.Of course, Jeremy himself is a big proponent of Anatoly's vision, not to mention Tether's penetration of USDT in third world countries. The day Solana announced that Tether had backed them, Solana shot up 60 points.

When a public chain has stablecoin, the decentralized finance on it will be easier to develop, easier to attract users to use these financial applications, and further encourage developers to develop more applications here.With developers and apps, and stablecoin, users didn't just happen. In addition to being concerned about how the Solana developer ecosystem works,I'm sure a lot of people care about how Solana got started, because you have this supply side, and it doesn't make sense that you don't have the consumption side. Some would argue that the first users an ecosystem attracts are often speculators, and therefore the first reaction to start making money, such as Raydium's creation, is very important.  

I don't deny the importance of this, but in fact you'll find that because Solana's transaction fees are so low, the bubble behavior of liquidity mining smart contracts that on-chain capital is keen to make more money by putting money on risky deposits is very prone to mining accidents on Solana. That is, it is washed away by the high frequency of mining and selling of funds. If a mine is not done well from the beginning to the end, it will soon die, even within a day.  

In my opinion, one of the biggest turning points was when the Phantom team decided to make a nice, silky wallet on top of the Solana.The Phantom team's background was Ethereum's old decentralized financial protocol Silicon Valley product, 0x, and its minimalist style was a refreshing contrast to the earlier generation of Solana wallets that were so miserable at the time, like Sollet. Phantom arrived on the eve of Solana's explosion of decentralized finance deals, and caught a wave of traffic perfectly. As an important front end to the interaction with the protocol, the user experience of the wallet largely determines the subsequent user behavior.I would even argue that whether or not there is a way to create a silky browser wallet, a mobile wallet, is the defining event for a public chain to gain mass adoption, and the Phantom is the browser wallet.  

Then the second turning point came from the appearance of Magic Eden. Before Magic Eden came along, Solana had no real NFT community at all,All the little pictures are imitation of stuff on Ethereum. Similar to Phantom, the core team of Magic Eden is also the background of Google in Silicon Valley. Together with another old decentralized finance Codydx, they only took less than two months to reach 90% market share in Solana market and NFT market from the launch. They were 90 percent there by the time of the Breakpoint conference in 2021.

They have a very strong business and community operations team that has taken the entire Solana NFT ecosystem from zero to one. Before Magic Eden, many of the projects on Solana were Ethereum imitators, with no truly native creator community.  

Again is actually STEPN. Many Solana users who have never touched blockchain are registered to learn about Solana through STEPN.The mobile wallet is an event that will determine public or mass adoption. If the Phantom is a browser wallet, I think STEPN's mobile wallet is an important part of it. Among STEPN's 5 million registered users, almost 30% are new users outside the circle, which means that they are not Solana but non-crypto circle native users. Many NFT users who are active in Solana ecosystem today also say that they contact Solana because of the fitness APP STEPN.  

I would also like to use these observations to try to answer another question, which is where does Solana go now that FTX has collapsed?

In fact, by this point, you probably already know my answer,Solana probably won't die, but it won't live the way it did.  

On November 10, 2022, the Solana Foundation posted a clarification on its official blog, which provided many details about how it was affected by the bankruptcy and liquidation of FTX, including the fact that Alameda and FTX had previously invested in SOL, There are also Sollet's hosting assets above the chain bridge.  

Raj, Solana's co-founder and former COO, tweeted on December 29, "Over the years, our community, which is still very active and passionate, has been affected by short-term, short-term hype, and they are like a harmful virus that needs to be cleaned up." Fever is painful, of course, but you are happy when it breaks out and you know it will be over soon, it is the last pain. So any bad molecule that gets washed out of this is actually a solid step on the road to more decentralization.  

But what he said at the end, which I think sounds like a cliche, is perfectly fine with Solana, because it's not just anything that kills the bad guy and then comes back to life, you might be completely dead. Solana probably won't, because it's been through a lot of ups and downs, even at the market level there's been a lot of turnover, and then there's a lot of organic developers,The failure of a core organization can be an important opportunity for it to evolve in a more decentralized way, which is painful for sure, but I think it's also an opportunity.  

Many people question that as the price falls, these Validators start to release the pledge, the security of the chain may lose the guarantee, small developers must be very worried, because the threshold of the validator node is very high, ordinary developers can not run node, it is not realistic. But from the perspective of big developers, the hidden cost of their migration to a re-engaging community can be even more deadly.

Developers like Magic Eden or STEPN, for example, may actually run their own verification nodes in an effort to make the chain truly public. 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.

I read the other day that Eletric Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, released its annual developer review. In December 2022, the month after the FTX collapse, Solana had the second largest number of active developers of any public ecosystem after Ethereum, with 2,082, an 83% increase over the same period in 2021. FTX and SBF, along with big investors, played a key role in Solana's rise from obscurity to popularity. But Solana may already be on her own, starting in early 2022.  

Finally, I'd like to share a short story with you. At the end of 2021, Multicoin held an event next to the Solana Breakpoint developer conference in Lisbon and invited its portfolio team in Portugal at that time. It was a time when the market was very good and the whole room was full of happiness. I turned around and found Anatoly himself leaning against the corner, quietly watching everyone talking in full swing, with a pure whisky in his hand. He saw me, and then he was visibly happy. He came up and gave me a hug and I said who would have thought it would be three years. He said, "Yes, it's been three years. It's great to have all my old friends."

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 hacker pine: https://solana.com/de/wormhole-hackathon

The 2nd Hackathon: https://solana.blog/2000-participating-in-solana-defi-hackathon-kicking-off-tomorrow/

Serum team's Solana needs to be built for hackathons: https://serum-academy.com/en/serum-project-ideas/project-ideas/ (link no longer available)

The third annual hackers pine: https://solana.blog/solana-season-global-hackathon-with-1m-prize-and-funding-pool/

The fourth hackers pine: https://solana.blog/katana-wins-out-of-568-projects-launched-in-massive-solana-ignition-hackathon/

The fifth hackers pine: https://solana.blog/solana-riptide-hackathon/

The ETH NYC jackpot: https://nyc.ethglobal.co/#prizes

Solana foundation to clarify and associated FTX/Alameda equity: https://solana.com/news/solana-facts-ftx-bankruptcy

Raj twitter: https://twitter.com/rajgokal/status/1608320254463348736

Electric Capital developers report: https://www.developerreport.com/

Original link

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