If 2021 was the time when the Solana community came out of obscurity, 2022 was a year of implementation and expansion.
It has been a wild ride with ups and downs! Despite everything, the Solana community has just gotten more powerful and kept their focus on constructing.
As we approach another Solana Solstice, it is necessary to pause for a moment, assess our success so far and anticipate what lies ahead. That is why you should trust in the Solana collective in 2023.
New protocols for real-world uses
This year, the Solana community concentrated on incorporating crypto into reality. This was exemplified by the launch of two fresh protocols from Solana Labs that acted as a catalyst for a plethora of new ventures
The much-anticipated Solana Mobile Stack and its leading product Saga were revealed at a surprise event in June. This technology aims to make web3 more available on mobile devices, as well as providing a secure user experience that is almost identical to having a hardware wallet. The DVT-1, the first Saga development kit, was delivered in December and consumer units are expected to be released by early 2023.
Since its debut in February, Solana Pay has opened the door to a seamless, unrestricted payment system. It is currently utilized by sellers and companies and is anticipated to expand further in 2023.
Developers
The developers are present and busy constructing. The year 2022 was a landmark for the Solana dev team. At the end of November, there were 2053 total active developers working on projects that use Solana and 1654 of them engaged in exclusively Solana-related projects. This major expansion in developer count could be because what used to be seen as challenging has become much simpler now due to improved education and tools for the Solana ecosystem, making it easier for newcomers to start quickly. The growing popularity of SolanaU on college campuses is also an important factor.
SolanaU Ambassadors have been aiding students and faculty at universities ranging from Berkeley to Belgrade. Applications for the following cohort of SolanaU Ambassadors are being accepted until December 22nd.
Mainstream adoption is coming
This was the year when established firms recognized the strength of the Solana network.
In a development that astonished the web3 community, Google Cloud declared they have been operating a validator which bolsters Solana blockchains. They are also offering support for Blockchain Node Engine to Solana — so people from all over the globe can operate a validator in the cloud — and indexing Solana data for simpler historical examination via Big Query.
In the year 2022, Brave browser added Solana support to their wallet. The announcement was made at Breakpoint 2021 and enabled both mobile and web browsers to access Solana dApps with ease. This integration was completed during 2022, making it more convenient for those not familiar with cryptocurrencies to get started on the Solana network.
The network keeps getting better
After a series of glitches last spring, the Solana engineers and wider Solana community have been devoted to upgrading the network. The results are clear: the Solana system is now more dependable, decentralized, and expeditious than ever before. To assess how far they’ve come, the Solana Foundation has published a succession of reports assessing the network and pinpointing which aspects still require optimization. Here’s what they determined:
- Solana network usage averages around 4,000 transactions per second, thousands more than the nearest competitor.
- Solana is arguably one of the most decentralized Layer-1 blockchains. As of Dec. 21st, Solana has 1,911 independent validators and a Nakamoto coefficient of 30.
- The average Solana nonvoting transaction uses less energy than three Google searches — far less an Ethereum transaction, even using estimates from after the Merge. The entire Solana network uses less energy per year than a single Bitcoin transaction.
- The entire Solana network is carbon neutral, thanks to the support of the Solana Foundation.
- Even during the collapse of FTX, a stress test of the network, Solana performed well under pressure. Average block time, or the time it takes for the network to produce new blocks, is a good proxy for the performance of the network. Even with the high volume of transactions on Nov. 8, average block time was at .61 ms, well below the historical average.
The network’s reliability is about to be further enhanced with the arrival of Jump Crypto’s Firedancer, a second validator client. The introduction of this new validator client will make it nearly impossible for any single bug to disrupt the Solana network — thus making it more dependable and consistent. Firedancer will make Solana the only other blockchain platform aside from Ethereum to have multiple validator clients.
Firedancer will dramatically speed up transaction times on Solana, increasing the network’s already impressive TPS from thousands to hundreds of thousands, or even millions. In a recent demonstration in a simulated environment, Firedancer managed an incredible .6 million transactions per second.
Solana is IRL
2022 could be the year that the Solana community emerges from the digital realm and begins to make its presence known in reality. Solana Spaces, a firm committed to shifting Solana’s members out of cyberspace into physical retail stores, has established two sites over the past twelve months.
The two stores – one in New York City and their main Solana Embassy situated in Miami – present projects from within the ecosystem and support newcomers with onboarding. And through SpacesDAO, their fresh decentralized franchising system, Solana Spaces will soon be arriving at places everywhere around the globe.
As the Solana Hacker Houses phenomenon swept across the globe, from Berlin to Bangalore and Seoul to Seattle, more than 24 of these spaces were established for Solana developers to congregate, build on their knowledge, and exhibit their work. Despite market turbulence, thousands of people attended these events – thus sparking a wave of blockchain-oriented venues geared towards creators. Already in 2023 there are a dozen such Hacker Houses open for sign-up.
At the end of the year, the Solana Foundation held Breakpoint – its annual conference that attracted 3,800 members of their community to Lisbon. This was almost double the amount of attendees from the year before and provided a platform for stimulating debates, technical exploration, and talks about what will come in 2021.
