In recent years, particularly after the FTX incident which raised doubts, Solana (SOL) has made a remarkable rise and has become the star of 2023, challenging those skeptical about the project.
Statements from Solana Executives
CoinJar CEO Asher Tan, in an interview with Forbes Advisor, stated:
In the last 12 months, Solana has seen a 300% increase, solidifying its place among the top five coins by market value.
However, SOL, which climbed above $120 by the end of 2023, entered 2024 with volatility. This led investors to question whether Solana would be a significant investment in 2024. Austin Federa, Strategy Head of the Solana Foundation, provided clarity on the issue in a recent interview with Scott Melker.
Federa also highlighted the impact of major projects like Helium and Render in 2023. Additionally, he emphasized projects such as Jupiter and Credix, highlighting the innovations of DeFi 2.0. Despite all this, according to Federa, what keeps Solana at the forefront is nothing other than its token extensions. He explained:
The Solana community has borrowed a lot of great ideas from the Ethereum and Cosmos communities. The concept of token extensions… is something we’ve seen brought to many networks and could become an idea of how things can be done on a larger scale.
Solana and Network Outages
Since 2021, network outages have been a significant pain point for Solana. These incidents have led to questions about the network’s reliability and sparked rumors about potential centralization issues. Paul Brody, the global blockchain leader at EY, focused on the outage that occurred on February 6 and commented:
People want to have an ETH killer – it’s a fun narrative… but I think (the outage) increases doubts.
Federa also made further remarks regarding these outages, emphasizing the necessity of absolute reliability.
He mentioned that minimizing downtime is a priority, and while zero downtime is the ultimate goal, there are challenges in reaching desired levels without sacrificing the network’s development and the benefits it offers. Federa stated:
A blockchain that never goes down but is unusable is not a useful system. A blockchain that goes down too often is also not a useful system.
The Future and Current State of Solana
In another statement, information about Firedancer was provided, and it is expected to be one of the most important long-term technologies to be used on the mainnet this year.
This likely development will bring Solana one step closer to Ethereum (ETH) and make it one of the pioneering projects supporting multiple independent validator clients along with its competitor.
Federa also commented on the potential future for Layer-2 solutions. He noted that their purpose is to maximize the efficiency of Layer-1 and also emphasized the benefits of Layer-2s in reducing requirements.
While these statements were being made, the price of SOL continued to be monitored by investors. At the time of writing, SOL’s price had settled above $114, marking a 1.89% increase.
