Crypto is a weird industry. It’s part tech, part economic theory, and part religion. I’m not quite sure what makes it so cult-like. People argue for hours about modular blockchains vs. monolithic blockchains, ETH vs. SOL, or Optimistic Rollups vs ZK Rollups. Interestingly, pretty much no one seems to be arguing about the fact that barely any crypto products have even the resemblance of product market fit (PMF). The total crypto market is a few million people at best, and the majority of those people are generally gambling, running scams, or speculating on pictures of cartoon apes. No, seriously. That’s almost 100% of this industry. Everyone is busy repeating optimistic tropes like “we’re so early”, “we’re going to onboard the next billion people”, or “mass adoption is coming”.
Of course none of this is actually true. We are not early, we can’t even onboard the next million people, and “mass adoption” is not coming unless something drastically changes. What’s more, you’ll often see those on Crypto Twitter (CT) talk about how Ethereum and the EVM has already “won”. I always chuckle when I see posts like this. What exactly has EVM won? There are less daily active users on Ethereum than even 1% of the users on TikTok. 1%! No one has won — certainly not in crypto. Yet.
Okay, where am I going with this? This is a post on choosing Solana after all — how does any of what I said relate to the title of this post?
It’s quite simple: Solana is the chain for pragmatists wanting to build real products. Something that crypto hilariously lacks.
While blockchain researchers and academics go to war on the intellectual front about modular blockchains, L2s (even L3s now!), sharding, and ZK rollups to scale for the “next billion users” — Solana is leveraging parallelization and hardware that’s available today to build a decentralized system that handles 5-50x more transactions than any other chain with 1000x less fees. All major tech scales with hardware (cars, laptops, TVs, phones, robots, AI, Cloud), Solana is no different. The SVM is a 10x improvement over the EVM due to parallelization alone. While other ecosystems argue about hypothetical scaling solutions, Solana is already scaling.
Don’t believe me? Look at some of the only crypto applications to actually find PMF so far: Phantom, Magic Eden, Helium, Stepn — all on Solana.
It’s not just about tech either — pragmatism is a core value in the Solana community. It’s an ethos that engulfs as soon as you enter the ecosystem. Solana Spaces, Solana Mobile, Solana Pay, Hacker Houses, Hackathons (with over 10k participants), Solana University Incubators, Teleport, Dialect, Hivemapper, Tiplink, Ottr, Backpack. The community is packed with those wanting to build real products to solve real problems.
We need to stop wasting so much time on debating hypothetical scaling solutions and purity tests. I see hundreds of arguments about whether Chain X is “decentralized” or if Chain Y needs better “BD” every single month. Why is no one arguing about the fact that we don’t have any real products with PMF? Why is no one arguing about the fact that there are barely any real sustainable businesses that aren’t full out ponzi schemes? It’s as if everyone is running away from the ugly truth that this industry is essentially an adult child that refuses to grow up. We worry about random gas optimizations and bridges and royalties instead of worrying about building apps that solve real problems. L2s, ZKs, sharding — these are all super cool technical solutions and the engineer in me gets excited to talk about them. But the pragmatist in me is concerned.
People ask me all the time why I build on Solana. My answer is simple: because Solana works, now. There’s nothing else to it. I’m not a Solana maxi, I’m a “root access to your digital identity and finances” maxi. I believe firmly that crypto has the potential to re-imagine how the digital world works. But I don’t think that potential will remain forever. We’re in a race against time. Every time we debate about sharding, or danksharding, or interconnected chains — we are adding yet another conditional, which when multiplied, reduces the overall probability of success for the industry. I want the industry to succeed. For the industry to succeed, we need to start building things that actually work and are useful. We can’t do this on Ethereum currently, it’s too expensive. We can’t do this on L2s yet either, they’re too early, centralized, and unreliable. That’s not to say L2s and ETH won’t scale in the future. But we can already do it on Solana, now. Solana simply works. Low fees, elastic compute, composability, a die-hard community. You don’t need anything else to start building the future.
Stop the infinite optimism. Stop kicking the ball down the road. Start building real products that solve real problems. When you’re ready, Solana will be waiting for you.