Solana, one of the most popular smart contract platforms, has been heavily impacted by last year’s FTX crash. Its TVL, which reached a peak of 10 billion, has plummeted to around 350 million dollars today. Additionally, it has lost many popular applications on the network due to losing its biggest financial supporter, FTX, to its competitors.
Solana News
The worst thing that happened to Solana was the migration of many protocols that fueled network activity to its competitors. NFT collections and smart contracts were the building blocks that positively affected the network’s utility. After the price exceeded $32, the Solana team made the right move at the right time by launching a startup incubator to attract new entrepreneurs and developers to Solana.
Emon Motamedi, the Product Manager of Solana Labs, stated:
“Incubator programs like this are crucial for the success of startups in Web3. Blockchain startups face a much more challenging journey compared to traditional technology startups because this space is still young and evolving in many aspects.”
Solana also has plans for a hackathon and an artificial intelligence accelerator. The Foundation has not disclosed how much investment it has made in the incubator program. Furthermore, the actions taken by competitors like Aptos have encouraged Solana to take action in this regard.
The Future of Solana (SOL)
If Solana’s team wants to succeed in the upcoming potential bull season, they need to do more. After the FTX crash, the total locked value of the network was almost zero. Even the 2023 peak, which was the TVL ATH of 10 billion dollars, is at around 3% level. To recover the network’s value, more applications need to be launched and attract attention to Solana.
Even a single application can have significant effects on network activities. We recently witnessed how the activities and price of the Avalanche network recovered with Stars Arena. Motamedi openly stated that they hope to attract developers from rival networks:
“There are exceptional technical teams that have gained great expertise and created notable things in other networks, and as the industry develops, they have learned about Solana’s unique technical advantages. However, some hesitated to switch to Solana due to the technical challenges it involves. The Solana Incubator aims to attract these talented teams.”
The Solana incubator plans to provide advice on fundraising, engineering, go-to-market strategies, and meetings with venture capital firms to newly established companies. If successful, the Solana Foundation may not lag behind its competitors in terms of SOL Coin price in the upcoming bull season.
