Solana Labs founder Anatoly Yakovenko remains confident in the prospects of the Solana blockchain amid increasing competition from other developing blockchain networks.
At least six blockchain networks are slated to launch in the near future, with Scroll, Linea, and Coinbase-backed Base projects already gaining traction among developers, potentially affecting market share for existing networks like Solana.
However, in a recent interview Yakovenko said he is not fazed by the new competition, arguing that none of these new networks can match Solana in terms of speed, transactions or number of nodes.
He noted that some projects have recently switched to Solana because of the technical advantage of blockchain. Helium, a cryptocommunications project, and Render, formerly of Polygon, are two such examples.
Additionally, according to analytics firm Nansen, wallet activity on Solana was the second highest among all blockchains in April, ahead of Ethereum and Polygon and second only to BNB Chain.
Yakovenko noted that the fall of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, although unprecedented, caused little damage to the Solana ecosystem, although FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was an active supporter of the blockchain.
He also noted that developers are continuing to build Solana. “The rest of the developers building on Solana really had nothing to do with FTX. And you saw it at the last hackathon,” said Yakovenko and added:
“We had more than 800 projects submitted during this hackathon. It was our biggest hackathon ever. So this happened, in fact, two months after the collapse of FTX.”
Solana is off to a good start in 2023
According to the report Messari “State of Solana for the 1st quarter of 2023”, Solana started this year on a high note.
The market capitalization of Solana’s native token, SOL, increased by 118.1% in the first quarter of this year compared to the last quarter of 2022. Since the beginning of the year, the token has grown by more than 127%.
The total network transaction fee paid in SOL also increased by 68.7% in the first quarter of this year, indicating an increase in network activity.
In addition, the average number of validators on the network increased by 18.9% quarter-on-quarter, indicating that the network is moving towards a more decentralized state.
Despite experiencing a crash after the release of version 1.14 in February, the number of priority commissions increased in the first quarter of 2023.
BONK airdrop, NFT collections and DePIN applications were among the ecosystem developments that encouraged payers and transactions on Solana.
Additionally, Solana’s NFT ecosystem experienced a boom in the first quarter, with total new daily NFTs increasing by 11.8%.
Regardless, SOL is currently trading at $21.93, down 2.1% in the last 24 hours. The token has gained around 5% in the past month, but is down more than 91% from its all-time high of $259 in November 2021.
