Original author: Austin Barack, Partner at Coinfund
Compiled by: Odaily Azuma
Editors note: From October 30 to November 3, Solana held Breakpoint, the annual ecological conference in Amsterdam. At the same time as the meeting, SOL was experiencing the strongest rebound after the bull market, reaching a peak of $60.
Austin Barack, a partner at Solanas early investment institution Coinfund, participated in this Breakpoint throughout the process. On November 14, Austin shared his experiences at this conference on the official blog of Coinfund, and combined with his previous experience of participating in Breakpoint in Lisbon in 2021, he tried to determine which node Solana is currently in in the bull-bear cycle. .
The following is the original content of Austin, compiled by Odaily.
Where in the market cycle are we today? Is it a bull market, a bear market, or somewhere in between?
Attending conferences is one of the best ways to learn about real market conditions.By attending meetings, we can learn firsthand how many developers are working hard in a certain ecosystem, what exactly they are developing, what challenges they face, which problems need to be solved first, and what gaps are there in the technology stack. What needs to be filled, which customer needs are not being met, how strong the developers sense of mission is... all these can be seen at a glance. Over the years, my experience participating in Breakpoint has given me a profound understanding of Solanas development.
This is my second time attending Breakpoint. I went to Lisbon in 2021 and planned to attend the conference in 2022, but in the end I was forced to cancel the trip due to a torn shoulder ligament. I can only pay close attention to the memories online.
2021 Breakpoint in the bull market
Breakpoint in 2021 was a typical bull market conference. At that time, the price of SOL soared to $250. A year ago, its price was only $1.
In November 2021, Solana’s TVL reached a peak of tens of billions of dollars. With the advantages of high throughput, low latency, scalability, and composability, Solana has won the favor of many people. A large number of outstanding developers are building on Solana. Many developers from other ecosystems are considering how to bridge and even cross-chain. Directly migrate to Solana. In addition, there are many investors and companies (including some Web3 giants) who are paying close attention to Solana. Of course, there are also some people in the ecosystem who do not care about technology and just bought SOL early and made a lot of money. money.
At the time, Solana showed great promise, but network adoption was still in its early stages.Like everything else in the crypto industry at the time, expectations for Solana were higher than reality in the short term.
2022 Breakpoint in the Bear Market
In 2022, the entire Crypto market suffered heavy blows one after another. The successive collapses of 3AC, LUNA, BlockFi, Voyager and Celsius triggered a series of panics, and token prices generally fell. No one in the Crypto industry was immune.
The price of SOL fell from more than 200 US dollars to around 30 US dollars (almost all major coins fell by the same amount). Solana experienced network outages, which affected its reputation in the short term. Some large-scale Dapps were eliminated. Many tokens issued earlier due to suboptimal economic model design (low circulation, high FDV) ultimately caused harm to the ecosystem. adverse effects.
Despite this, the Solana community has shown great resilience. Many people still stick to the ecosystem, continue to improve their technology, and some new ideas are beginning to sprout. Solana has become the largest NFT ecosystem after Ethereum; Helium announced its migration to Solana; the new data transfer protocol QUIC and pledge-weighted QOS were deployed; the local fee (gas) market was completed; the new client Firedancer started development; Saga The mobile phone was released successfully.
Breakpoint 2022 is a typical bear market conference, but from a more positive perspective, the focus of the conference is still to maintain construction and improve infrastructure to support the next wave of application needs and improve the current user experience.Many core technology upgrades have been announced and are being tested or deployed. Market sentiment is generally gloomy, but the Solana community is still persevering and working hard to build as always.
However, when Breakpoint ended and people were on their way back to prepare to implement the results of the meeting, the biggest black swan in 2022 appeared - FTX suddenly thundered.
FTX, along with Alameda Research, has been one of the biggest supporters of the Solana ecosystem.Affected by this, the price of SOL fell from US$30 to below US$10.People began to openly question whether Solana could survive the storm, with many saying Solana was dead, and some even cheering Solanas death.
However,Despite the devastation, Solana is not dead.The community united. I have never seen this in the Crypto industry. The founders of one group of projects began to support the founders of another group of projects. Some investors left, but new investors came in.
Solana has a community on X that encourages and supports each other. The community spontaneously organized a Sandstorm themed hackathon to promote the ecological development process; BONK ignited the communitys meme emotions; some NFT projects left Solana, but the users and liquidity on Solana are still there, and NFTs such as Mad Lads and Claynosaurs began appeared; Render announced that it will migrate to Solana; DeFi has also begun to gradually recover; Visa announced that it will be built on Solana; MakerDAO also hinted that it may build a native chain based on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)...
Some market participants have begun to wonder whether they were too hasty in dismissing Solana.After optimizing network stability, Solanas technical advantages began to show again, with its multi-threaded architecture supporting local fee markets, parallel processing, and modern hardware scaling (hardware requirements for validators are actually falling). This means Dapps don’t have to compete for network resources or face unpredictable fees. This also means that scaling can be done directly at the Layer 1 level, without the need for additional execution environments, which often sacrifice a certain degree of composability and decentralization.
NFT state compression makes minting NFTs on Solana 100 times cheaper than on other networks, and this will also extend to underlying data compression over time. This means that Solana will not only support ordinary PFP collections, but also support decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePin), as well as large-scale games with millions of props, as well as a variety of tools designed for global Web2 enterprises. On-chain loyalty program.
Solana is no longer just a Layer 1. SVM has become a key infrastructure for modular blockchain design, supporting SVM-based application chains, as well as SVM Layer 2 verified by other networks, etc.
As we approach Breakpoint 2023, the tide has turned, but not everyone has kept up with the progress Solana has made in the year since the FTX debacle.
2023 Breakpoint, which cycle of Solana corresponds to?
Breakpoint in 2023 gives me the feeling that if the FTX incident had not happened, Solanas development situation would have been like this. This is not to belittle the work done by the community to repair FTX after the thunderstorm, but to emphasize that everyone has put in great efforts to achieve this achievement.
Breakpoint in 2023 is filled with a lot of high-quality builders. Major teams are building in infrastructure, DeFi, wallets, NFTs, DePin and other areas, and almost all the infrastructure improvements discussed at Breakpoint 2022 have been implemented.
Although the conference is full of excitement, this excitement has a clear purpose and driving force.Sentiment about the year ahead appears to be undergoing a definite shift, moving firmly from bearish to bullish.
This years Breakpoint venue had almost no visitors that only appear at bull conferences, and there was almost no discussion about prices (although SOL almost doubled in the three days of the conference agenda). On the contrary, everyone has realized that the price increase is at best just for the sake of price. Marketing to attract new users and developers actually has little direct significance for ecological development. In order to make the increase more sustainable, we need more users on the chain, more enthusiasm, more applications, and more Many adoption cases.
To achieve this, everyone is very focused.There was a strong sense of self-awareness throughout the venue that we still have a lot of work to do, but also a clear awareness that the foundations needed to achieve these goals are in place.I leave Breakpoint 2023 more bullish than ever on Solanas future and convinced that it will play an important role in Cryptos move toward mainstream adoption.
I predict that the next 24 months will be Solanas big time and something unique is about to emerge. This includes high-performance and composable DeFi, payment applications that are an order of magnitude higher in cost and speed than Web2 or traditional banks, groundbreaking DePIN, Internet-scale NFTs, mobile 2C applications in gaming and social, A new generation of wallets, and the infrastructure to support all of the above applications.
If you are building in these areas or more, please feel free to contact me (Austin).
