Why Solana?
Why I'm building on a chain that has only 76 devs?
Ok, so in every crypto event I attend and in many online talks with some of my crypto web3 folks, certain small myths and attacks always follow this question. In this short article, I'll answer why I like Solana and why I'm still here, building my business after all its ups and downs.
I could keep this essay mainly focused on the KPIs comparing Solana to Ethereum and all the other L2s combined or spend most of my time debunking all the myths that surround the chain to this date due to disinformation and bad faith. Instead, I'll briefly go over those, and right after, I'll jump into my personal views of why I put all my eggs in Solana's basket and why I firmly believe it's the best place for me and my company to be. Oh yeah, and I'll approach the meme coin talk as well.
Please read this essay with a grain of salt as it is biased, taking into consideration that I literally jumped all in into the Solana ecosystem last year after quitting my NYC startup job and moving back to Brazil so I could solely focus on building Hexis, but this is a topic for another essay.
The numbers don’t lie:
So, let's briefly talk about numbers: Since around September 2024, we have seen an uptrend in all major KPIs that blockchain analysts like to see and talk about.
Developers building on Solana = Surpassed Ethereum and all the L2s.
Daily Active Addresses = Higher than all the other major chains combined.
Protocol + chain fees (Revenue) = Absurdly high
Trading volume = No need to talk about
The chain that the President of the USA chooses to launch his token 😆
The list goes on and on... If you don't believe me, you can check the metrics using any credible source...
The list goes on and on... If you don't believe me, you can check the metrics using any credible source...
Yeah, on TVL, Solana is still (very) behind Ethereum, but I have a strong feeling that this might change in the upcoming years. The game has changed, and Solana is working hard to prove itself and bring the big guys in with the real money. We have the regulations in the USA opening the door for a Solana ETF, we have major companies starting to build on Solana, and more than that, we have a strong effort from the Solana Foundation (which until the past month was my major critique) trying to stay ahead of all the regulations. Once we start to see mass institutional onboarding, it will be just a matter of time, and this has already started.
Solana ETF in the USA:
One good example of this is Black Rock making moves:
Solana Foundation is making moves to be ahead in the regulation game with the launch of the Solana Policy Institute:
With all that out of the way, I just need to kill some myths before we can continue with my personal view of why I chose Solana.
Whenever we talk about Solana, there are always some ghosts from the past (or some complete bullshit) that comes back to haunt us, so let's tackle them.
1st Myth: Outages
Solana goes down a lot! How can you trust a chain that the "foundation" can restart it with the click of a button??
Well, this one is actually composed of two myths: Solana doesn't go down all the time. Actually, the last time we had an incident was in February 2024, but because everyone out there needs to hate Solana, they like to scream that! On the other side, Solana is one of the few chains that deals with situations like this publicly and in a good manner. It's not like other chains never went down. It's just that they don't talk about it or share data regarding the incident.
One small article that tackles this is: https://jp12.medium.com/l1-outage-list-c89a1d167d0a
On the other hand, Solana keeps this dashboard updated, containing all historical data about incidents, so go there and check it yourself. (https://status.solana.com/uptime?page=1)
The second aspect of this myth is that the Solana Foundation somehow could restart the network by itself, but in reality, in order to restart the chain, there is a need for 80% or more validators to agree and take action. They handle this together via a Discord server.
2nd Myth: Centralization
With that comes the myth of centralization. People always throw that at me as if they had a "secret weapon," but in reality, it is just a really bad argument (if you consider it an argument at all).
This myth was born due to how expensive it is to run your own Solana node (around $1200/month in major Cloud providers), but for some reason, people still think we're in 2020... Today, Solana has more than 1300 validators across the globe (you can check them here: https://www.validators.app/validators?locale=en&network=mainnet)
Today's Nakamoto Coefficient of Solana is around 20, a very good number compared to all other chains, but we've been higher, and I believe we will get back there! To have a comparison, Cosmos has a score of 7, Avalanche a score of 25, and Polygon a score of 4. Yeah, Solana isn't as centralized as your eth maxi told you.
“Simply put: the higher the Nakamoto Coefficient on a network, the more resilient the network will be to these kinds of attacks. And the more resilient the network is to these kinds of attacks, the more decentralized and censorship-resistant it is.” Check the Nakamoto Coefficient here: https://nakaflow.io
3rd Myth: Nothing besides Memecoins
The third myth is that there are no dAPPs on Solana and that the chain only exists due to meme coins (something that many consider cancer, but I think otherwise... this is a topic of its own for a later day), but this is a lie. Solana's "super meme season" started some months ago (around Jan 2024 but it took a while for it to get traction), and just as Ethereum, BSC, and Arbitrum had their volume increase a lot during their meme-coin season, Solana had the same. But on steroids, as Solana offers a simple and direct UI/UX.
People who use this argument usually go on talking about PumpFun, and yeah, I totally agree that PF brought a lot of volume on-chain by solving a major issue (and creating a few others), but Solana is NOT PumpFun.
So, let’s check how Solana was before PF:
- Here, we can see that the uptrend on TVL (on SOL) started at the end of 2023 and not 2024
Besides that, Solana has always had a great community, and many dAPPs today the most used apps are DeFi platforms. For example, Kamino (the AAVE of Solana on steroids) made 7mil on fees in the last month (which many consider a bad month as "memecoins" died).
I believe Solana is the chain that puts the most effort into hackathons. The foundation, together with many investors, promotes several hackathons every year to help incubate great new teams and projects. Keep in mind that most of today's great dAPPs came from there... so it seems to be working out!
You can check about Solana hackathons here
And actually, they are starting a new one!
Today, the chain has more than 200 active protocols, many of which are in the top 100 of all protocols when looking from a fee generation or daily active users perspective. Yeah, it's not as much as Polygon with their 600 protocols, but all the EVMs have an enormous amount of protocols due to the ease of launching a fork or a copy-cat as they are all built on Solidity while in Solana, the Chad devs must know Rust to build real good programs.
I won't spend more time on it, but you can check the numbers here: https://defillama.com/chains
Now that I took all that out of the way, let's talk about Why Solana is the place to be.
Now that I have taken all that out of the way, lets talk about Why Solana is the place to be.
Why Solana?
To explain why I love Solana, I must explain how I ended up here. It all started back in 2021. I had recently graduated from college (Class of 2020), and even though since 2018 or so, I had already traded some tokens, since I had never before actually utilized any of the chains, it was pure speculative trading. In 2021, this changed when I learned deeper about DeFi and how I could make some good extra amount of money by yield farming.
Once I started playing around with the first DeFi projects, I fell in love and started studying all the protocols I liked very profoundly. I remember having a notebook where I would write down everything about the protocol I was studying. I don't remember it all, but some names that came to mind from back then were Francium (this was one of the best!), Larix, Tulip, Cropper, and so many others... Some are still around and stronger than ever, like Raydium, Orca, and Lifinity. (And soooo many others that I don't remember right now ofc)
Around mid-2022, the NFT season boomed, and it was the first time I met Brazilians in Solana. Because I was only consuming content directly from the protocols and some American KOLs, I had never before interacted with Brazilians on WEB3, and it was a great experience. I helped in the construction of CookinDAO, which became for a period of time the biggest Brazilian DAO solely focused on Solana - Solana was THE THING in Brazil and in many other third-world countries because, for the first time, we had a super-fast chain that was so cheap that anyone could use it and build on it. On CookinDAO, I made friends and built a new family, linked not by blood but by the Solana chain. To this date, I'm an active member of CookinDAO and many other amazing Brazilian communities that help onboard newcomers to WEB3.
In CookinDAO, I also met my current business partner, Rafael Ribas who, IMHO, is one of the most intelligent and competent individuals when talking about Solana technology and development. Back in 2023, we noticed an uptrend in trading volume, and because we didn't want to miss the train, we developed a trading software that would help us with different automated trading strategies. We monetized it, and this software helped us bootstrap what Hexis Labs is today: a research and development firm focused on Solana with a strong educational arm to help incubate the top builders of tomorrow.
So, for me, the answer to "Why Solana" goes beyond just feelings:
The tech actually works: The numbers I shared earlier don't lie - insanely low costs (like fractions of a penny) + blazing speeds (65k+ TPS) + that exponential growth with IBRL. When you're trying to build something that won't break the bank for users, there's literally nothing else that comes close!
The Chad devs are HERE: We've somehow surpassed Ethereum in active devs despite needing to know Rust (which isn't easy!). This isn't just random devs either - these are the ones willing to learn harder languages because they know the tech is worth it.
It's actually being used: Remember those metrics I talked about? Leading ALL chains in daily active addresses isn't just some vanity metric - it means real people are actually USING this thing! Add in the massive protocol fees and institutional players sniffing around, and it's obvious this isn't just hype.
No BS culture: Where else would you see the project's founder and president openly debate something like SIMD-228 on opposite sides? Seriously, try to imagine that in any other ecosystem! This place values actual debate over meaningless consensus. As Toly put it, "Steel sharpens steel." (https://x.com/aeyakovenko/status/1897853895453688208)
Anyone can build here: How else could me and Rafael, two guys from Brazil, bootstrap a successful business on-chain with minimal capital? The combo of practically zero fees and insane throughput means builders from ANYWHERE can jump in and create.
My personal journey from just trading tokens to building Hexis Labs is basically Solana's story in microcosm - from "maybe this works" to "holy shit, this WORKS."
And I'm definitely not alone here. Talk to any founder building in the ecosystem and you'll hear the same thing:
Solana is different, Solana is Home.
This essay and many others are part of it as we want to bring in easy and plain English difficult tech topics and talk about the Solana ecosystem. So expect from us articles like these, deep dives on projects and teams, educational content for builders, and deep technical research about Solana technology and infrastructure.
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