Last year, I visited Solana’s Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam.
My take on conferences: You can only learn so much by listening to presentations. The real value is in meeting folks one-on-one.
I did exactly that, meeting Solana (SOL) founder Anatoly “Toly” Yakovenko… top crypto investors like Multicoin Capital and a16z… and the founders of zkSync and Arweave (AR).
This was one of the best crypto conferences I’ve attended. There wasn’t any hype and there weren’t any hucksters — just a coming together of quality entrepreneurs building world-changing crypto businesses.
And I left convinced Solana is an excellent investment. That same week I send my Venture subscribers a buy alert saying “this is our opportunity to buy Solana at a great price — before the next bull market really heats up.”
Solana (SOL) surged 300% since:
Source: TradingView
And it’s going much higher in 2025.
Ever heard of the “infinite bid”?
When tens of millions of Americans get paid every other week, they buy stocks on autopilot through their retirement accounts.
This creates continuous demand for stocks, which puts a floor under prices.
Crypto lacked this infinite bid until ETFs arrived.
That all changed when bitcoin ETFs got the green light to start trading at the beginning of 2024.
The floodgates opened. Billions of dollars of Wall Street’s money started pouring into crypto for the first time ever. Just two months after their launch, $60 billion worth of investor money poured into these funds:
For context, the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) was formerly the fastest ETF to accumulate $10 billion in assets… but it took three years to do it.
BlackRock’s (BLK) iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) achieved this milestone in just seven weeks.
A few months later, Ethereum ETFs got approved as well.
Now, the world’s largest asset managers — including BlackRock, Fidelity, VanEck, and others — are telling their clients to buy and hold BTC and Ethereum (ETH) in their 401(k)s.
They’ll soon be advising to buy SOL through Solana ETFs too.
Expect Solana ETFs to be approved in early 2025.
So far, five institutions applied for a Solana ETF: VanEck, 21Shares, Canary, Bitwise, and Grayscale which is converting its existing Grayscale Solana Trust (GSOL):
Source: Bloomberg
The SEC’s first review deadline on January 23, 2025.
This date is important because it happens just 3 days after SEC commissioner Gary Gensler leaves office.
If you don’t know Gensler, he was the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the last four years. And he’s ultra-hostile to crypto. As long as you’re making worthless memecoins named after a pet hamster you’re fine. But try to build something useful with crypto, that could land you in jail.
Fortunately, Gensler is resigning the day Trump takes office. And Trump is replacing him with Paul Atkins who’s as pro-crypto as it gets.
Atkins has been working with the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a crypto advocacy group. They’ve been campaigning to remove stifling crypto oversight and create more supportive crypto regulations. As the SEC chairman, he can make all that happen with a stroke of a pen.
We already have Ethereum and bitcoin ETFs. Solana ETFs are the logical next step. But I expect asset managers like BlackRock (BLK) and VanEck to start filing applications for all kinds of new crypto ETFs under Atkins’s pro-crypto SEC.
More important, Solana is 17 times smaller than bitcoin. That means it takes a lot less money to move its price.
Even if Solana attracts 10% of the inflows bitcoin got, logic says that when billions of dollars start flowing into SOL, its price will rise exponentially.
And while bitcoin is basically digital gold, Solana is the foundation of an entire digital economy.
Thousands of blockchain apps are being built on the Solana infrastructure. Think of how the App Store works on your iPhone. You can download millions of apps for just about everything. The only limit to what “apps” developers can build on Solana is their imaginations.
Today, there are over 500 apps running on Solana’s blockchain — and it’s the home to many of the world’s top DeFi projects like Raydium (RAY), Ondo Finance (ONDO), Jito (JTO), and others.
And each app pays millions of tiny fees to Solana for each transaction. Solana made $177 millions in fees in November.
Developers love Solana because it’s the fastest of all the major blockchains.
Solana currently processes 65,000 transactions per second — just as fast as Visa. That’s 10,000X faster than bitcoin and 2,000X better than Ethereum.
Solana is also far cheaper to use than most other blockchains. It costs about three bucks to do a transaction on bitcoin. And between $8 and $40 on Ethereum. A transaction on Solana will set you back $0.00025 — a fraction of a penny.
How did Solana achieve these incredible breakthroughs?
Solana pioneered proof of history (PoH).
I could spend the next five pages talking about PoH.
It’s deeply technical and requires some complicated “moon math” to pull off. Here’s a brief overview…
On most blockchains, users have to “talk” to each other to figure out how to order transactions in each block. This causes delays and limits how many transactions a blockchain can process.
PoH solves this time challenge. Solana created a clock that essentially timestamps each transaction. It also automatically decides the order in which transactions get recorded onto the blockchain.
This dramatically boosts its speed.
Solana was built to execute transactions as fast as possible. The title of Solana’s first investor presentation read: “Blockchain at Nasdaq Speed.”
Solana is a “trustless” computer that can process transactions at the speed of light. This will unlock a whole new class of apps.
“What if you could request a ride from your phone?”
That’s what Uber founders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp asked themselves on a cold winter night in 2008.
Uber was a genius invention. With two taps on your smartphone, a driver will come and pick you up. But Uber couldn’t have worked without another all-time great invention, the iPhone.
Imagine trying to use Uber on a laptop? You would be limited to ordering taxis from home or work. Drivers would have to carry laptops around in their cars to accept rides.
Apple’s iPhone made Uber possible. The iPhone’s built-in GPS could track your location, allowing riders and drivers to connect.
The iPhone unlocked Uber and dozens of other incredible new businesses. Solana will do the same for crypto. The world’s fastest blockchain enables a whole new class of decentralized apps that were previously impossible.
Until Solana, there wasn’t a blockchain that could handle the volumes required by traditional stock exchanges. Solana’s ultra-fast speeds and low cost make it the perfect place to build “high-frequency” apps like streaming, gaming, and messaging.
The point is: there isn’t one blockchain to rule them all.
Each chain has its own strengths. For example, apps that want unmatched security will still be built on Ethereum. And nothing will rival bitcoin as “digital gold.”
Crypto isn’t a winner-take-all market. It’s a multi-blockchain world where certain chains will carve out niches. The opportunity for this tech is so large that several chains will be worth trillions of dollars each. And we can make a lot of money investing in the best ones.
In short, Solana makes crypto faster, cheaper, and smoother than ever before. This is drawing in thousands of new developers… who are building game-changing apps… which will attract hundreds of millions of new users… and billions of dollars from investors. Don’t be surprised to see SOL break through $1,000 in 2025.
For more insights, subscribe to my investing letter The Jolt⚡.
I publish fresh research on stocks and crypto every Monday and Friday.
Also, I run a crypto advisory called Venture. You can learn more about it by clicking here.
— Stephen McBride, Chief Analyst at RiskHedge
Is Solana still a good investment after surging 300%? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.