Solana has outperformed all expectations in the aftermath of the FTX black swan event, which saw the price of its native token plunge to single digits. Now, it stands as far more than the unlikely underdog. With VanEck’s recent filing for a Solana (SOL) exchange-traded fund, Solana is knocking on the doors of the big leagues.

But what makes Solana so powerful that Pantera Capital declared it the “macOS of blockchains”? It all boils down to the user experience. Solana is perhaps the most consumer-facing blockchain that seeks to meet users in the middle and even, sometimes, abstracts away its on-chain features.

Solana’s monolithic blockchain architecture

Unlike modular blockchains like Ethereum and Cosmos, the monolithic design of Solana’s network allows for vertical integration. It’s a design that optimizes every blockchain component, resulting in a seamless user experience, much like the one with Apple’s operating systems.

This architecture enables Solana to handle high throughput and low transaction fees. Both are crucial factors for decentralized finance applications, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs), and a host of other low-friction blockchain applications, such as the recently launched Blinks. Thanks to optimizing its entire stack, Solana is an attractive platform for developers and users alike, contributing to a surge in retail activity and decentralized exchange (DEX) volume on the network. As a result, Solana has seen growth spikes in both the number of active users and the volume of transactions, positioning it as a leading blockchain.

Growing on-chain activity

Solana’s growth is evident from its increase in unique active addresses from 14,000 in October 2020 to nearly 1.34 million today. Priority fees have also jumped from under $100,000 per month in mid-2023 to over $60 million in March 2024. The share of DEX volume on Solana has also risen significantly, from 0% in early 2021 to over 24% by May 2024, while 85% of all new tokens on DEXs as of May 2024 were based on Solana.

It’s fairly easy to explain these on-chain growth trends. Solana has become a popular favorite for creating new tokens and meme coins. The ease of use, combined with Solana’s speed and low transaction fees, have made it the destination of choice for casual traders. The rise in popularity of Telegram trading bots, no doubt, contributed to the on-chain explosion on Solana, with the market cap of community-driven meme tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF) having reached billions.

The world’s first mainstream blockchain

It would be short-sighted to attribute all of Solana’s growth and future promise to the money markets. Sure enough, platforms like MarginFi and Jupiter are pushing the envelope for simple defi products that don’t require users to have deep pockets in order to gain a meaningful edge in the trading experience. But Solana has proven itself to be capable of so much more.

Perhaps that explains why Pantera Capital just concluded a raise for a new fund aimed at purchasing up to $250 million worth of SOL tokens (at a significant discount since the tokens are from the FTX bankruptcy estate). This came on the heels of a mega investment decision in April by Pantera Capital and Galaxy Trading to buy around 30 million locked SOL tokens with a cumulative value of $1.9 billion.

Even though the price of SOL has risen over 723% in the past year, Solana provides many opportunities for venture capitalists outside of speculating on the SOL token. One thing has become clear: crypto-adjacent technologies and digital systems that otherwise integrate web3 functionalities are closer to home for the average user than blockchain-native products. Solana is already one of the most widely used blockchain networks and is firmly charting a course to take crypto products to mainstream consumers.

Why venture capital is bullish on Solana

If the Apple comparisons ring true, Solana would have succeeded in giving users refined web3 use cases that change how we communicate, transact, and create. From real estate to digital networks, from AI systems to identity verification services, there is no shortage of such projects being built on Solana. Privasea, for instance, is a technology that attests to human liveness to protect the digital presence of real people from bots and AI impersonations. With deep fakes, sybil activity, and other forms of digital fraud becoming more rampant than ever, solutions like Privasea are addressing a necessary aspect of daily life.

Another fine example is Grass, a layer built on Solana that is designed to give users control of the rails by which data itself is acquired for AI. The implication of its success would be to disrupt the billion-dollar AI industry, where only a handful of players have sufficient computing resources to crawl the entire internet. With over two million users already, Grass currently boasts the ability to fine-tune specific AI models and inform certain types of real-time inference. It is projected that, by the time Grass hits 25 million users, it will be capable of crawling enough data to train ChatGPT from scratch on a weekly basis!

As a final note, critics point to Solana’s history of network outages as a bearish factor. This perspective, of course, fails to consider that a major upgrade called Firedancer is slated to go live next year. Already, lite versions are being rolled out to incrementally boost the network’s resilience against congestion. Circumstances are conspiring to make Solana the home of a fresh generation of blockchain users, opening up untapped markets and revitalizing prevalent ones. Therefore, it only makes sense that venture capitalists are swooping in early with strategic long-term investments.