「I'm now buying all your SOL at market price of $3, sell if you want, then scram.」 This was FTX founder SBF's reply to a Solana skeptic trader on Twitter on January 10, 2021, 「SOL is about to see a massive buy order, as every billionaire in the world is calling me and SBF (for Solana advice)」.

On December 1 of the same year, Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, made a tweet. At that time, SOL's price had already exceeded $230, with a yearly increase of over 150 times, becoming the star of the entire crypto industry.

「Here are the reasons for the disappearance of the Solana chain and the token SOL going to zero.」 This was in December 2022, one year later, when ETH maximalist James Spediaccio predicted in a tweet that SOL would be wiped out of the crypto market. At that time, SOL was affected by the crypto winter and FTX's bankruptcy announcement, dropping to as low as $8, plummeting over 96% in a little over a year, nearly to zero.

「Only Possible On Solana」, in the midst of the community collectively chanting this slogan, on November 22, 2024, SOL's price reached $260, surpassing the previous all-time high of the last bull market. The surge from the low to the high point was over 30 times, completing a phoenix-like rebirth.

Solana's Early Years

The Birth Story of Solana

A billion-dollar start doesn't seem to be that uncommon. Anatoly Yakovenko, a Ukrainian former Qualcomm engineer, wanted to create an on-chain order book trading platform. He quickly realized that Ethereum couldn't handle the throughput of on-chain transactions. One night, Anatoly had 3 cups of coffee, couldn't sleep, got up, and wrote down the initial Solana code.

According to Mable, Chief Revenue Officer of STEPN and former partner of Multicoin Capital, in her podcast, Solana's fundraising phase wasn't smooth. In 2018, the Solana team went to Asia for fundraising, coinciding with a bearish crypto market phase, and the market had been hurt many times by the narrative of high-performance public chains, so Solana's fundraising efforts in China, South Korea, and Japan hit a wall.

In 2019, Anatoly, who attended Shanghai Blockchain Week, was already somewhat well-known. During that event, newcomers like Solana and Near kept appearing at various peripheral events. Anatoly repeatedly explained to others what Solana was, but most people didn't actually pay much attention. Just like Vitalik did in China a few years ago.

After multiple rounds of fundraising, the Solana team finally raised $25.53 million. This amount was much lower compared to today's star public chains that easily raise hundreds of millions, and even lower than other chains like Near and Avalanche that released tokens around the same time.

The Rise of Solana—SBF's Choice

After the mainnet launch, Solana didn't attract much attention. For example, when the network experienced block production interruptions due to certain issues, no one in the community noticed. It wasn't until the second half of 2020 that Solana truly began to enter the mainstream view. The sole reason for this was the arrival of FTX's founder, SBF. The real rise of Solana is absolutely inseparable from SBF's support. According to Mable's account, SBF and Solana's encounter was not just a coincidence but more like a mutual choice.

At that time, FTX had just been established for a year and quickly carved out its territory in the trading race. SBF, coming from Wall Street, indeed showed the cryptocurrency industry something different. Not only did they offer a trading experience different from other competitors, but SBF himself also deeply immersed in the industry, participating in every single hot topic.

During the early days of DeFi Summer, SBF wanted to move transactions on-chain as much as possible. So SBF's team proactively contacted star chains like Polygon, Avalanche, and Near. The market rumors at that time suggested that FTX was most interested in Near, but their mainnet was still some time away from launch, and SBF couldn't wait. Upon learning this news, Multicoin's Kyle found a way to introduce Anatoly to SBF.

In the early hours of July 2020, Kyle had a three-hour-long conversation with SBF, and SBF became interested. The following day, the Solana chain suddenly suffered a dusting attack, with numerous small transactions happening simultaneously and persistently on Solana. Yes, it was SBF who did this to personally test the actual performance of the Solana chain, and in the end, Solana withstood the massive influx of garbage transactions from the SBF team. On that same day, SBF decided to invest in Solana. A few days later, Serum, FTX's self-incubated decentralized order book matching engine, was born.

Subsequently, the Solana ecosystem experienced explosive growth.

The Rise of the Solana Ecosystem

First was Serum, with a peak circulating market cap exceeding 1 billion USD, while other Solana ecosystem projects such as Raydium, Oxygen, and Star Atlas landed on FTX.

Furthermore, FTX's support meant that other centralized exchanges had to start integrating and supporting this new Layer1 network, significantly raising the priority of Solana-related matters on major centralized exchanges' schedules. SBF even personally organized a group chat for Anatoly and Jeremy, the CEO of USDC's parent company Circle, to support USDC's integration with the Solana network.

In addition to SBF's support, the Solana team itself has been actively hosting hackathons to attract developers from around the world. It can be said that today's Solana hackathons have become a key source of Solana ecosystem vitality. With its performance advantage and SBF's unparalleled ability to pump the price, the Solana token SOL went from less than 1 USD to a peak of 248 USD in 2021, creating a myth.

At that time, Solana, ranking behind the leading Ethereum and BSC, could not be said to be the absolute king of public chain ecosystems, but compared to Avalanche and Near at the same time, Solana's fundamentals under the blessing of FTX had already been completely transformed. However, no one expected that SBF would encounter trouble.

Conclusion

In 2022, the crypto winter arrived, and as the Terra (Luna) ecosystem and Three Arrow Capital (3AC) successively experienced crises, market panic continued to spread. Eventually, under the combined internal and external pressures, the greatest supporter of Solana, also the most influential supporter in the industry at the time, fell—FTX declared bankruptcy.

FTX's and Alameda's bankruptcy heavily affected the entire Solana ecosystem. Not only did it cause the Solana Foundation to suffer losses of over 180 million USD in crypto assets, but it also directly disrupted the critical underlying protocol of the Solana DeFi ecosystem, Serum. Since a significant authority resided with FTX, this foundational protocol quickly announced its failure.

Impacted by this series of "catastrophic" events, Solana's Total Value Locked (TVL) also plummeted from a bull market high of 10 billion USD to around 200 million USD, and a series of star projects chose to leave the Solana ecosystem and migrate to EVM chains.

Even worse, Solana's technology has also been plagued by issues. In mid-2022, the network experienced multiple interruptions due to a surge in transaction volume. All of this has led to doubts about the reliability of its technology. The term "Solana downtime" seems to have become synonymous with the project.

The community was in an uproar, the SOL token plummeted, and it seemed like Solana had hit a point of no return.

The Rebirth of Solana

On the fifth day after the SOL token dropped to $8, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted.

"Some smart people told me that Solana has a sincere and smart developer community, and now that those terrible opportunistic funds have been washed out, this chain has a bright future.

I find it hard to judge from the outside, but I hope the community gets a fair chance to develop."

Vitalik's words seemed to act as a calming influence, and the SOL token saw a sharp rise. The panic in the Solana community was alleviated during the subsequent continuous uptrend.

In the following days, apart from Multicoin's unwavering support for Solana, Placeholder's Chris has been publicly advocating for Solana from December 2022 to the present, and another partner, Joel Monegro, who had once written the Fat Protocols thesis at USV, wrote a comparison article between Ethereum and Solana in October 2023, pointing out that Ethereum is like Android, while Solana is more like iOS.

And as for the events of 2024, everyone knows about them. That year, when SBF's late-night dusting attack test became a reality, with hundreds of new assets issued every minute and tens of thousands of transactions occurring simultaneously, only Solana could perfectly support this huge transaction feast. Alongside the birth of meme coins with a market value of billions of dollars, SOL, starting from $8, also reached a historic high, with a market capitalization of a trillion dollars.

Why Did Solana Reach a New All-Time High?

Precise Rhythm Control by the Team and Foundation

At the darkest moment following the FTX collapse, Solana's fate seemed to have been sealed. FTX was not only an investor in Solana but also one of its most important ecosystem promoters. However, FTX's collapse not only deprived Solana of its strongest ally but also pushed it to the brink of market trust.

Facing such a crisis, the Solana Foundation chose a pragmatic path to revival. They quickly disclosed all assets related to Alameda, demonstrating financial transparency, while significantly optimizing the network infrastructure. By improving the validation mechanism and transaction throughput control, they effectively reduced downtime events. This steadfast commitment unaffected by external pressure helped Solana regain some of the community's trust.

However, what truly brought attention back to Solana in the market was not just its technical improvements but the value it created for developers and users through tangible actions.

Hackathons: The Engine of the Solana Ecosystem

Starting from the end of 2022, the Solana Foundation increased the scale of hackathon events, attracting global developers' attention. These events not only enhanced community vitality but also incubated a batch of highly promising projects.

According to incomplete statistics, in the past three years of hackathons, 60,000+ developers participated in Solana's hackathons, with 4,000+ projects launched, raising a total of over six billion US dollars in funding and giving birth to star projects such as Jito, Tensor, io.net, Marinade, Solend, and more.

Hackathons are not just a platform for developer exchange but also a vital source of innovation in the Solana ecosystem. Many projects quickly materialize post-hackathon, injecting strong momentum into the ecosystem's prosperity.

The Triumph of Pragmatism

Mable, who witnessed Solana's rise, mentioned when summarizing the reasons for Solana's success, "Solana's founder has a small ego, the entire team has a very pragmatic style, they do not hold on too much, they do not feel the need for a set of things deemed as gospel. Whatever can help the project gain more attention, recognition, and usage, they will try, they are not afraid to be embarrassed, fail, and try again."

Solana did not loudly proclaim "disruption" or "changing the world" but focused on improving efficiency and reducing costs. With the ability to process over 65,000 transactions per second and transaction costs as low as $0.00025, Solana became the preferred network for MEME transactions. This practical application-focused strategy also allowed Solana's ecosystem to exhibit vast diversity, covering various aspects of users' lives from payment tools to Web3 social, and even consumer-grade devices.

This technologically pragmatic style is not only popular in the crypto world but has also gained recognition from traditional financial institutions. Financial giants like Visa have already piloted cross-border payments on the Solana chain, validating Solana's technological potential. These partnerships have not only expanded Solana's application scenarios but have also opened the door for it to penetrate into the mainstream financial world.

Summary

In 2024, Solana's performance was outstanding, demonstrating strong on-chain economic activity, even approaching or surpassing Ethereum in multiple key metrics. Relying on its ultra-high transaction throughput and extremely low transaction costs, Solana has become the preferred choice for on-chain high-frequency trading. The number of active user addresses and on-chain transaction volume continue to rise, especially driven by the MEME coin craze, Pumpfun has attracted a large number of new users, making Solana the hub of secondary market trading.

From falling into the abyss to reclaiming the peak, Solana's story may not only be a project's triumph but also a symbol of the cryptocurrency industry's resilience. From a price performance perspective, SOL's market capitalization has reached 33% of Ethereum's, soaring over 18 times from the bear market low point. Such growth not only reflects the market's recognition of Solana's technological advantages but also demonstrates its strong ecological resilience and market appeal. Whether it's payments, DeFi, or the MEME coin trading frenzy, Solana is proving with actual data that "resetting" to the peak, Only Possible On Solana.

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