Solana founder unfazed by FTX woes and growing blockchain competition – here’s the latest

Solana Labs founder Anatoly Yakovenko remains bullish on the prospects of the Solana blockchain amid growing competition from other emerging blockchain networks.

At least six blockchain networks are set to launch soon, with Scroll, Linea and the Coinbase-backed Base projects already gaining popularity among developers, potentially affecting market share for existing networks like Solana.

However, Yakovenko stated in a recent interview that he is not affected by the new competition, claiming that none of these new networks can match Solana’s speed, transactions or number of nodes.

He noted that some projects have recently moved to Solana due to the blockchain’s technical superiority. Helium, a crypto connectivity project, and Render, formerly of Polygon, are two such examples.

In addition, wallet activity on Solana was the second highest among all blockchains in April, according to research firm Nansen, which ranked Ethereum and Polygon and came second behind BNB Chain.

Yakovenko noted that the fall of crypto exchange FTX, while unprecedented, has done little damage to the Solana ecosystem, even though FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a vocal proponent of the blockchain.

He also mentioned that developers continue to build on Solana. “The rest of the developers building on Solana really had nothing to do with FTX. And you saw that in the last hackathon,” Yakovenko said, adding:

“We had over 800 projects submitted during that hackathon. It was our biggest hackathon ever. So and it happened basically two months after the FTX collapse.”

Solana has a good start in 2023

According to the “State of Solana Q1 2023” report from Messari, Solana has started this year on a high note.

The market value of Solana’s original token, SOL, increased by 118.1% in the first quarter of this year compared to the last quarter of 2022. The token is up more than 127% YTD.

The network’s total transaction fees paid in SOL also increased by 68.7% in the first quarter of this year, indicating an increase in network activity.

Also, the average number of validators on the network increased by 18.9% QoQ, which means that the network is moving closer to a more decentralized state.

Although there was a blackout after the release of version 1.14 in February, the implementation of priority fees increased in the first quarter of 2023.

BONK airdrop, NFT collections and DePIN applications were among the ecosystem developments that encouraged fee payer and transaction activity on Solana.

In addition, Solana’s NFT ecosystem saw an uptick in Q1, with the total number of new daily NFTs increasing by 11.8%.

Still, SOL is currently trading at $21.93, down 2.1% in the last 24 hours. The token is up around 5% over the past month, but down more than 91% compared to its November 2021 record high of $259.