After experiencing serious setbacks in 2022 and 2023 – partly due to the crypto winter at that time – Solana eventually roared back to life in 2024. The Layer-1 blockchain demonstrated unprecedented growth as the fastest-growing large ecosystem within the year, outperforming even Ethereum in terms of YoY growth.
Solana’s performance in 2024 was nothing short of success, as it became the second largest developer ecosystem across every continent, underscoring its rapid adoption. Similarly, last October, it attained an all-time high of over 120 million monthly active addresses. Beyond its fully decentralized and secure posture, Solana’s stellar performance over the past few months was driven by meme coins.
Solana – A Popular Hub For Meme Coins
Don’t forget that the popular blockchain is a formidable hub for many meme coin developers, all thanks to its strong technical foundation and developer-friendly environment. Initially, most of these coins prefer to launch on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. However, with Solana offering a better throughput, lower cost, and a tapestry of rich functionalities, most developers decided to turn to the network to create their innovative projects.
Solana’s position as a hub for meme coins was further strengthened with the presence of key projects like Pump.fun and Raydium. Pump.fun, for instance, enables anyone to create and distribute their meme tokens with ease. The low barrier to entry and ease of use of Pump.fun significantly lure a large meme coin investor base to Solana.
In fact, during the last meme coin frenzy, Solana, according to data from DeFiLlama, processed $100 billion in decentralized exchange trading volume. This huge on-chain activity emphasizes the massive adoption of its reliable architecture among blockchain users.
Besides meme coins, Solana also provides a friendly environment for other innovative projects that cut across NFTs, Dapps, gaming, metaverse, and many more, making it an all-around blockchain.
Solana Popularity Brought Many Challenges To The Network
However, Solana adoption continues to grow, recording high-volume trading almost every day, the blockchain is now enduring problems. Its widespread popularity has brought several issues like constant downtime, scalability issues, and network congestion to the ecosystem. In fact, last year, data shows that 75% of SOL transactions were failing at one point. This setback has, to an extent, restrained the blockchain from actualizing its full potential.
Users have also been expressing their frustrations over delayed or failed transactions on the network, with some even claiming the network is already walking the path of the blockchain it was planning to kill – Ethereum. As the market anticipates the next bull run – a period when market activity is always at its peak – users believe the issues could worsen for Solana.
So far, new measures and recommendations are emerging most especially by the Solana foundation. They include optimizing computing unit usage, executing priority fees, and leveraging stake-weighted Quality-of-Service to prioritize transactions efficiently. Currently, many transactions on the network do not use the entire computing unit budget, thereby causing inefficient scheduling.
What’s Next?
That being said, for Solana to avoid walking the same path as Ethereum, it is time for the team to prioritize infrastructure enhancements. This will help accommodate more transactions during peak cycle and minimize any form of system failures.
Similarly, the emergence of a Layer-2 sidechain on Solana will also play a crucial role. Currently, Solana does not have one though a new project – Solaxy is promising to bring this advanced architecture to the ecosystem. Solaxy, according to its whitepaper, plans to redefine the performance of Solana with its Layer-2 functionality.
It aims to process transactions off Solana, bundle them together before returning them back to the mainnet. With that, the heavy workload on Solana will drop drastically and the frequent congestion issue will reduce. Solana users will enjoy an improved users experience if this project launches.
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