Solana's Incredible 2024 Is About Much More Than Just Memecoins

Solana's ecosystem has experienced remarkable growth this year — building on its remarkable comeback story in 2023 — and solidifying its position alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as a leading crypto stalwart.

Solana builder and Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz joined Coinage exclusively to discuss what comes next for the Solana ecosystem as part of our Crypto Project of the Year celebration. Our members will vote on which one of the 16 nominated projects will win the crown (and unlock patronage dividends in the process.) Head to Coinage's Snapshot to vote — ( you'll need a Coinage Caucus or Network NFT.)

Mert reflected on Solana's journey over the past couple of years since the FTX collapse, how unified the community now is in the mission to build faster infrastructure rails and what lies ahead.

Reflecting on Solana's progress, Mert emphasized the ecosystem's resilience and its ability to thrive despite industry skepticism. "People were calling us dead," he noted. "They were saying, 'Oh, everybody left. Your chain won't scale. Your chain is going to go broke. You don't have enough fees.' We overcame that." It's also something Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko credited his community of builders for last year when Solana was nominated in 2023.

Mert's path into the Solana ecosystem began during his tenure as a tech lead at Coinbase, where he observed various blockchains, including Ethereum and Polygon. His passion for solving critical infrastructure challenges led him to co-found Helius, focusing on developer tools to accelerate blockchain innovation. "The biggest issue that I noticed, perhaps on a grander scale for crypto, is the lack of real, useful applications," he shared. "That problem annoyed me. Still annoys me quite a bit today."

But as Coinage has documented, Solana's speed as a performance-based blockchain has enabled a booming DePIN ecosystem, including the likes of fellow Project of the Year nominee Helium which is building a decentralized network of wireless connectivity. It has become home to numerous similar projects, and despite that many still attribute Solana's rise in 2024 to its booming memecoin ecosystem.

"[Memecoins] have a social element which obviously infects the social layer, and the more attention they get via social networks, the bigger they go," Mert said. "I don't think it's weird that they have the most attention. What I would say, though, is it is incorrect to say something like, well, all Solana has are memecoins, right? ... It just turns out that Solana provides the best experience for launching tokens, moving them around, trading them, holding them on your wallet, and that can't happen unless we have infrastructure that actually works and scales with the amount of users."

Indeed, Solana's continued resurgence in 2024 has been driven by multi-dimensional growth across DeFi, consumer applications, and infrastructure. Projects like Kamino and Jupiter have propelled Solana’s DeFi total value locked (TVL) to $5.7 billion, while new stablecoins like PayPal's PYUSD continue to gain traction. Now, pricing data oracles like Pyth are setting their eyes on enabling onchain trading for TradFi and stocks after perfecting things for crypto trading. On the whole, Mert credits a shared mission within the Solana community as part of why the community has been able to continue scaling.

"One is we are engineers at heart, and we focus on the user and actually making things that work," he said. "And then two is the community really rallies behind that vision of decentralized Nasdaq and increasing bandwidth, reducing latency and when you have an aligned community like that, it tends to accomplish a lot of great things."

As the blockchain landscape continues to evolve, Solana’s adaptability, driven by a passionate community and relentless focus on innovation, positions it as a formidable force in Web3’s next chapter as Ethereum's scaling roadmap takes off with Layer-2s and more performant newcomers like Sui sprout up to challenge Solana's lead as the other Ethereum-killer killer.

Coinage NFT holders can vote to advance Solana or Akash in our celebration of the top projects in crypto. (If you haven't registered to join the Coinage DAO, do so first to unlock the ability to vote.)

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