Last year, I visited Solana\u2019s Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam.<\/p>\n
My take on conferences: You can only learn so much by listening to presentations. The real value is in meeting folks one-on-one.<\/p>\n
I did exactly that, meeting Solana (SOL)<\/strong> founder Anatoly \u201cToly\u201d Yakovenko\u2026 top crypto investors like Multicoin Capital and a16z\u2026 and the founders of zkSync and Arweave\u00a0(AR).<\/p>\n This was one of the best crypto conferences I\u2019ve attended. There wasn\u2019t any hype and there weren\u2019t any hucksters\u200a\u2014\u200ajust a coming together of quality entrepreneurs building world-changing crypto businesses.<\/p>\n And I left convinced Solana is an excellent investment. That same week I send my Venture<\/em><\/a> <\/em>subscribers a buy alert saying \u201cthis is our opportunity to buy Solana at a great price\u200a\u2014\u200abefore the next bull market really<\/em> heats\u00a0up.\u201d<\/p>\n Solana (SOL) surged 300%\u00a0since:<\/p>\n Source: TradingView<\/em><\/p>\n And it\u2019s going much higher in\u00a02025.<\/p>\n When tens of millions of Americans get paid every other week, they buy stocks on autopilot through their retirement accounts.<\/p>\n This creates continuous demand for stocks, which puts a floor under\u00a0prices.<\/p>\n Crypto lacked this infinite bid until ETFs\u00a0arrived.<\/p>\n That all changed when bitcoin ETFs got the green light to start trading at the beginning of\u00a02024.<\/p>\n The floodgates opened. Billions of dollars of Wall Street\u2019s 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\u00a0funds:<\/p>\n For context, the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) was formerly the fastest ETF to accumulate $10 billion in assets\u2026 but it took three years to do\u00a0it.<\/p>\n BlackRock\u2019s (BLK) iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) achieved this milestone in just seven\u00a0weeks.<\/p>\n A few months later, Ethereum ETFs got approved as\u00a0well.<\/p>\n Now, the world\u2019s largest asset managers\u200a\u2014\u200aincluding BlackRock, Fidelity, VanEck, and others\u200a\u2014\u200aare telling their clients to buy and hold BTC and Ethereum (ETH) in their\u00a0401(k)s.<\/p>\n They\u2019ll soon be advising to buy SOL through Solana ETFs\u00a0too.<\/p>\n So far, five institutions applied for a Solana ETF: VanEck, 21Shares, Canary, Bitwise, and Grayscale which is converting its existing Grayscale Solana Trust\u00a0(GSOL):<\/p>\n Source: Bloomberg<\/em><\/p>\n The SEC\u2019s first review deadline on January 23,\u00a02025.<\/p>\n This date is important because it happens just 3 days after SEC commissioner Gary Gensler leaves\u00a0office.<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t know Gensler, he was the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the last four years. And he\u2019s ultra-hostile to crypto. As long as you\u2019re making worthless memecoins<\/a> named after a pet hamster you\u2019re fine. But try to build something useful with crypto, that could land you in\u00a0jail.<\/p>\n Fortunately, Gensler is resigning the day Trump takes office. And Trump is replacing him with Paul Atkins who\u2019s as pro-crypto as it\u00a0gets.<\/p>\n Atkins has been working with the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a crypto advocacy group. They\u2019ve 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\u00a0pen.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s pro-crypto SEC.<\/p>\n More important, Solana is 17 times smaller than bitcoin. That means it takes a lot less money to move its\u00a0price.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201capps\u201d developers can build on Solana is their imaginations.<\/p>\n Today, there are over 500 apps running on Solana\u2019s blockchain\u200a\u2014\u200aand it\u2019s the home to many of the world\u2019s top DeFi projects like Raydium (RAY), Ondo Finance (ONDO), Jito (JTO), and\u00a0others.<\/p>\n And each app pays millions of tiny fees to Solana for each transaction. Solana made $177 millions in fees in November.<\/p>\n Solana currently processes 65,000 transactions per second\u200a\u2014\u200ajust as fast as Visa. That\u2019s 10,000X faster than bitcoin and 2,000X better than Ethereum.<\/p>\n 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\u200a\u2014\u200aa fraction of a\u00a0penny.<\/p>\n How did Solana achieve these incredible breakthroughs?<\/p>\n I could spend the next five pages talking about\u00a0PoH.<\/p>\n It\u2019s deeply technical and requires some complicated \u201cmoon math\u201d to pull off. Here\u2019s a brief overview\u2026<\/p>\n On most blockchains, users have to \u201ctalk\u201d to each other to figure out how to order transactions in each block. This causes delays and limits how many transactions a blockchain can\u00a0process.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This dramatically<\/em> boosts its\u00a0speed.<\/p>\n Solana was built to execute transactions as fast as possible. The title of Solana\u2019s first investor presentation read: \u201cBlockchain at Nasdaq\u00a0Speed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat if you could request a ride from your\u00a0phone?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n That\u2019s what Uber founders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp asked themselves on a cold winter night in\u00a02008.<\/p>\n Uber was a genius invention. With two taps on your smartphone, a driver will come and pick you up. But Uber couldn\u2019t have worked without another all-time great invention, the\u00a0iPhone.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0rides.<\/p>\n Apple\u2019s iPhone made Uber possible. The iPhone\u2019s built-in GPS could track your location, allowing riders and drivers to\u00a0connect.<\/p>\n The iPhone unlocked Uber and dozens of other incredible new businesses. Solana will do the same for crypto. The world\u2019s fastest blockchain enables a whole new class of decentralized apps that were previously impossible.<\/p>\n Until Solana, there wasn\u2019t a blockchain that could handle the volumes required by traditional stock exchanges. Solana\u2019s ultra-fast speeds and low cost make it the perfect place to build \u201chigh-frequency\u201d apps like streaming, gaming, and messaging.<\/p>\n The point is: there isn\u2019t one blockchain to rule them\u00a0all.<\/p>\n Each chain has its own strengths. For example, apps that want unmatched security will still be built on Ethereum<\/a>. And nothing will rival bitcoin<\/a> as \u201cdigital\u00a0gold.\u201d<\/p>\n Crypto isn\u2019t a winner-take-all market. It\u2019s 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\u00a0ones.<\/p>\n In short, Solana makes crypto faster, cheaper, and smoother than ever before. This is drawing in thousands of new developers\u2026 who are building game-changing apps\u2026 which will attract hundreds of millions of new users… and billions of dollars from investors. Don\u2019t be surprised to see SOL break through $1,000 in\u00a02025.<\/strong><\/p>\n For more insights,<\/strong> subscribe to my investing letter The\u00a0Jolt\u26a1<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I publish fresh research on stocks and crypto every Monday and\u00a0Friday.<\/p>\n Click here to subscribe.<\/a><\/p>\n Also, I run a crypto advisory called Venture<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>You can learn more about it by clicking\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Stephen McBride, Chief Analyst at <\/em>RiskHedge<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n Is Solana still a good investment after surging 300%?<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last year, I visited Solana\u2019s 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 \u201cToly\u201d Yakovenko\u2026 top crypto investors like Multicoin Capital and a16z\u2026 and the founders of zkSync […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Ever heard of the \u201cinfinite bid\u201d?<\/h3>\n
Expect Solana ETFs to be approved in early\u00a02025.<\/strong><\/h3>\n
And while bitcoin is basically digital gold, Solana is the foundation of an entire digital\u00a0economy.<\/h3>\n
Developers love Solana because it\u2019s the fastest of all the major blockchains.<\/h3>\n
Solana pioneered proof of history\u00a0(PoH).<\/h4>\n
Solana is a \u201ctrustless\u201d computer that can process transactions at the speed of light. This will unlock a whole new class of\u00a0apps.<\/h3>\n