Posted:
- Solana has soared up the charts over the past twelve months
- Exec identified token extensions as the USP of the network
Emerging from a bearish market that raised doubts about its viability, Solana (SOL) defied skeptics to become one of the most notable artists of 2023. Asher Tan, CEO of CoinJar, pointed this out in a conversation with Forbes Advisor. He said,
“With a 300% increase in the last twelve months, Solana has firmly established itself as a top five coin by market capitalization.”
However, SOL has had a difficult start to 2024. So the question is: is it wise to be optimistic about Solana in 2024? Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, explained why in a recent article interview with Scott Melker.
Recent developments on Solana
Federa highlighted that the most active category within the Solana space is decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). He highlighted the major migrations of 2023, such as Helium and Render.
Additionally, the director touched on decentralized finance (DeFi) 2.0 innovations, mentioning projects such as Jupiter aggregator and Credix. What makes Solana stand out, however, according to Federa, is that token extensions. He explained,
“The Solana community has borrowed a lot of great ideas from the Ethereum community and the Cosmos community. The idea of token extensions… is something that we see brought to a lot of networks, and that could become kind of an idea for how the stuff can be done more broadly.
Network disruptions
Since 2021, Solana has interacted with many network disruptions which have become a central concern within the cryptocurrency community. It has led to discussions about the reliability of the network and possible centralization problems. Paul Brody, EY’s global blockchain leader, spoke about the latest outage on February 6, saying:
“People want to have an ETH killer – it’s a nice story… but I think (the outage) raises doubts.”
Federa also recognized the need for absolute reliability and stated that minimizing downtime is a top priority for the engineering team, with the ambition to significantly reduce recovery time. He suggested that while zero downtime is the ultimate goal, achieving this without compromising the evolution and usability of the network presents a complex challenge. The director noted:
“A blockchain that never breaks down and that no one can use is not a useful system. A blockchain that breaks down too often is also not a usable system.”
Future of Solana
According to the director, Firedancer is likely the most important long-term technology to be deployed on the mainnet this year. This development is expected to make Solana one of the few smart contract platforms Ethereum (ETH)to support multiple independent validator clients.
Federa also discussed the potential for Layer-2 solutions. He suggested that while the goal is to minimize its need by maximizing Layer 1 throughput, future scalability may require some degree of layering. He also discussed the development of Teleport, an open ride-sharing protocol that represents a step toward interoperable applications within the Solana ecosystem.