Solana (SOL) Soars 300% in a Year Amid Network Concerns, Eyes Future Tech

Solana – A Success Story Despite Obstacles

Within one year, Solana (SOL) has established itself as a top-5 cryptocurrency, achieving a remarkable growth of 300%. Despite some network disruptions and a difficult start to 2024, the question remains: Is it wise to bet on Solana in 2024?

Developments at Solana

In an interview with Scott Melker, Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, emphasized that the most active category within the Solana space is the decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs). He highlighted the major migrations in 2023, such as Helium and Render. He also discussed innovations in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) 2.0 and mentioned projects like the Jupiter Aggregator and Credix.

According to Federa, Solana is particularly characterized by token extensions. He explained: “The Solana community has adopted many great ideas from the Ethereum community and the Cosmos community. The idea of token extensions… is something we see in many networks and could be an idea of how things can be broadened.”

Network Disruptions at Solana

Since 2021, Solana has experienced several network disruptions that have sparked discussions in the cryptocurrency community. Questions were raised about the reliability of the network and potential centralization issues.

Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader, commented on the most recent disruption on February 6th, saying: “People want to have an ETH killer – that’s a fun narrative…but I think (the disruption) casts doubt.

Federa emphasized the need for absolute reliability and explained that minimizing downtime is a top priority for the engineering team.

Future of Solana

According to Federa, Firedancer is likely the most important long-term technology being deployed on the mainnet this year. This development is expected to make Solana one of the few smart contract platforms that support multiple independent validator clients alongside Ethereum (ETH).

Federa also discussed the potential of Layer-2 solutions. He suggested that while the goal is to minimize their necessity by maximizing Layer 1 throughput, future scalability may require some layering.

In addition, he mentioned the development of Teleport, an open rideshare protocol, which represents a step towards interoperable applications within the Solana ecosystem.