Solana - Developers, Leaders & Momentum

Hackathon numbers are growing, by far the best leading indicator

Over the last month I have come around to the fact that Solana has the most momentum of any project outside of ETH. While DFinity, Cosmos, Polkadot and others vie to attract developers, Solana has pulled ahead. Here are the data points that convinced me:

1. Kain’s Twitter thread in April discussing why ETH needs to take Solana seriously.

   kain.eth @kaiynne

   Something I’m a little concerned about given the recent interactions I’ve had with the BSC and SOL communities is that they seem to be genuinely gaining organic traction. Much more so than say EOS or Tron last cycle. I have some thoughts about this…

2. Kain and Kyle Samani on the Unchained Podcast - : Solana asks; What is the Minimum Viable Decentralization in terms of bandwidth and number of validators. Maybe this needs to be tested? Samani estimated Raspberry Pi for Bitcoin, Normal PC for ETH and high end machine with high bandwidth for Solana. Kaine pushed back a bit saying it was a specialized server.

3. Solana podcast - A number of promising founders are now building on Solana and there were 7000+ developers registered for the latest hackathon. By far the biggest leading indicator is an uptick in developers. The first hackathon had about 1000. Sino Global put together a list of some of the promising projects that came out of the most recent event.

   Sino Global Capital @sinoglobalcap

   The second Solana hackathon has successfully concluded with interest from projects all over the world. Our chads @OmniscientAsian, @TTx0x and @cweihan took this opportunity to go through all the projects and drop some free alpha. Here are some interesting ones to monitor:

4. A tradfi trader friend who is bullish on Solana but not deep in the trade offs said: - ‘Nothing comes close in terms of speed.’ He didn’t really care about immediate decentralization. The chain is auditable and SBF is reputable. Solana is attractive to a market segment with lots of money. Tradfi people.

5. Uncommon Core interview with Kyle Samani - Discusses how SBF battle tested Solana a year ago. FTX team are using Serum as a test of what can be done with derivatives, options and perps. Solana prioritizes predictability over decentralization. Kyle claims that sharding and L2 solutions may cause delays and composability issues on ETH. Solana uses Rust, a popular programming language to attract developers who are new to blockchain development and it seems to be working.

6. Technical Roundup “I would never buy a stock unless the fundamentals were great and the chart was great” Druckenmiller. Cryptodonalt and Cred have highlighted Sol as one of the few alts that stand out from a technical point of view.

7. Fresh raise from all the big guns - Explains why it looks so technically strong. Very strong hands are buying.

8. Conclusion

In the early days of a blockchain you need a leader & developers. Anatoly, Kyle and SBF serve as the leaders who explain the tradeoffs and stake their reputation, while developers hack around a core idea. The hackathons are growing and smart money has jumped in. Of all the ETH killers, Solana has the most momentum.