This week, Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, hosted the first conference organized by Solana Foundation — Solana Breakpoint 2021 — and on Monday (November 8), Solana Labs co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko (CEO) and Raj Gokal (COO) discussed the state of the Solana ($SOL) network.
After welcoming the attendees to the conference and thanking the Solana team, Yakovenko and Gokal presented some very interesting information about the current state of the Solana network and the Solana ecosystem, a few highlights of which are presented below with the help of the slides they used in their presentation.
Speed, Cost, and Degree of Decentralization of Solana Blockchain
Yakovenko pointed out that since it takes around 110ms for light to travel half way around the world, theoretically, Solana’s block time latency could be reduced in future to 1/4 of what it is today.
As for number of transactions processed by the network, the number he gave was 37.9 billion, though, at the time of writing, this number has increased to around 38.6 billion. And based on data from the Phantom wallet, as of November 8, there were around 1.26 million monthly active users of the network.
Regarding decentralization, Yakovenko mentioned that currently Solana is running on around 2000 nodes (eventually, there will be around 100,000 nodes)., and that their goal is to “maximize the cost to destroy allreplicas” and “maxmize the cost of messages’ ability to arrive to all replicas”.
Solana Ecosystem
Gokal pointed out that the Solana ecosystem has been “exploding” across “every vertical”, “every use case”, and illustrated this with the help of two infographics (created by Twitter use “Solanians“) from March 2021 and October 2021 that give a rough idea of how fast the Solana ecosystem has been growing over the past several months.
Of course, the two main reasons for the very rapid growth in the Solana network usage and the growth of its ecosystem are the popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Stablecoin Support by Centralized Crypto Exchanges
Gokal said that the Solana team is “very happy with the progress of SPL Token support across exchanges”, that “almost all the major exchanges now support the SPL Token standard”, and that thanks to this support, it is possible to move USDC and USDCT between these exchanges via the Solana network.
As you can see from the slide shown above, Huobi was one of the few major centralized exchanges that did not have Tether (USDT) support for Solana. Well, yesterday, Huobi announced that it had taken care of this problem:
Solana Developers
As of early November 2021, there were around 1,750 Solana developers.
And most of these people, according to Gokal, are not playing around — they are “building real businesses”. He illustrated this fact using the following chart that shows how during each of the past four major Solana hackathon events the number of projects has grown from around 50 one year ago at the first Solana hackathon to around 570 at Ignition (the fourth Solana hackathon), a global hackathon that took place between August 31 and October 15.
He went on to say that the aim is to have over a million developers building Solana-powered decentralized apps for over a billion people.
Investment in the Solana Ecosystem
According to Gokal, it is estimated that over $2 billion of venture capital has so far been invested in the Solana ecosystem.
Here are a few of the big-name investors that are funding the rapid growth of the Solana ecosystem:
The Future of Solana
Gokal reminded everyone that the vast majority of the most difficult technical and integration issues have already been solved and that the roadmap ahead is really more defined by the people who are building Solana-powered apps.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
Image Credit
Featured Image by “LauraRinke” via Pixabay
