Solana has seen a meteoric rise over the past few months. While SOL has pumped up the price charts, network popularity, adoption, and ecosystem-centric developments have made headlines too.
This sudden surge in popularity has been fueled by the unparalleled scalability of the network, along with a lower transaction fee, when compared to Ethereum. The latter, for instance, has often been plagued with network congestion and mounting gas fees.
However, Solana is not the only potential ‘Ethereum killer’ that exists. Other layer-1 solutions such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Polkadot have given stiff competition to this comparatively new blockchain.
And so began the layer 1 wars, where different solutions are vying for the ultimate prize of dethroning Ethereum. According to Solana Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, this will depend not so much on the tech, but on the strength of the community.
During a recent podcast, the Co-founder claimed that Solana is built with the vision of getting the most amount of people on board the network. Building it as a layer two solution would have compromised the ethos of decentralization, a compromise users usually make for a lack of a better substitute, he added.
According to the exec, Solana is built to change that.
“We’re coming in is saying no that’s [ __ ], you can achieve the same level or higher level of decentralization at a cheaper cost to users with a much larger set all participating and at the same time.”
He went on to say,
“The bullish case for the single chain world is that the fastest, cheapest, most decentralized chain will probably have the largest number of cities on it.”
Apart from a huge community, another aspect that the engineer looked at while creating Solana was the optimization of trading activities on the network. Yakovenko stated that while Ethereum’s transition to 2.0 has turned its native token Ether into a deflationary asset, this is only a positive development for the token’s price and not necessarily for the network’s users. The latter, he claimed, now have to pay increasingly higher gas fees for each transaction.
This was part of the reason why Solana’s user base recently boomed as the network claims to have the ability to carry out 700,000 transactions per second. This high throughput capability is a factor of appeal to high-frequency traders who can avoid network congestion and high fee while carrying out DeFi trades.
While Solana’s initial rally has worn off, the token was able to appreciate 7.7% in value over the past week due to larger market developments.
What about the future though? Yakovenko gave an interesting twist to Solana’s future price prediction, stating,
“I predict that the cost of state on Solana is gonna be even a hundred times cheaper than what it is today”
Solana has been making waves in the NFT space for months now. And, much of its own success can be attributed to the ongoing NFT mania. In fact, it was recently reported that the total market cap of Solana’s NFT had breached $1 billion. What’s more, its marketplace SOLSEA is proving to be a tough contender to Ethereum.
