Author: Biteye Core Contributor Anci
Editor: Biteye Core Contributor Denise
'Solana's greatest advantage lies in its versatility, enabling it to support multiple types of applications and tracks simultaneously.'
—Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation
Many relationships in the world are like seesaws. On one side, the price of ETH's tenth-anniversary coin is recovering, while on the other side, SOL is somewhat anxious—its path as the 'Ethereum killer' has become more challenging, and it is facing a batch of its own 'killers'—there is a sense of cyclical change.
However, moderate anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing for individuals or projects. For the battle-tested Solana, it is even more adept at coping with it. In this article, we intend to explore some of Solana's recent major moves together and delve into the current landscape of Solana AI and future outlook.
01. Official major moves emerge frequently.
1. Alpenglow Upgrade: Replacing SoH, racing against faster competitors like SUI.
Alpenglow is regarded as the most significant upgrade to Solana's core protocol to date, comparable in significance to Ethereum's transition from PoW to PoS consensus, as Alpenglow's mission is to replace the existing PoH (Proof of History) and Tower BFT (Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanisms.
Why replace the existing formula mechanism?
In the past, PoH significantly simplified block synchronization time, as it did not need to synchronize timestamps like other blockchains, and Tower BFT adopted a 'one person packages, others vote' method. However, this structure incurs significant computational overhead under high loads, compounded by the single-lead overload issue in Tower BFT, leading to frequent downtime complaints about Solana.
Additionally, one common criticism of Solana is that the cost of node operation is too high, leading to insufficient decentralization.
How does Alpenglow improve?
In simple terms, Alpenglow removes PoH, a potential computing power killer, using Votor (stake-weighted voting) to handle the time order and confirmation of node clocks, thus reducing the computational burden on leading nodes; and addressing the drawbacks of single leadership in the design, paving the way for future implementations where multiple leaders can propose blocks simultaneously.
Another core component, Rotor, is designed to optimize block propagation and synchronization, reducing block confirmation time from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Additionally, because Rotor reduces communication overhead and computational burdens between nodes, even weak nodes can participate efficiently, achieving 'performance upgrades without hardware upgrades.'
According to Cogent Crypto's validator yield calculator, after the implementation of Alpenglow, the minimum staking amount required for validators to be profitable will drop from 4,850 SOL (approximately $800,000) to 450 SOL (approximately $75,000).
Final expectations.
The Alpenglow white paper states: 'Alpenglow will be a turning point for Solana. It is not just a new consensus protocol but a key step for Solana to move towards competitive internet infrastructure.'
In simple terms: faster, more stable, cheaper, more scalable, and more decentralized, reclaiming the throne of performance and escaping the nightmare of downtime.
2. ICM Roadmap: Re-optimizing trading, continuously moving towards 'on-chain Nasdaq.'
Announcing the Alpenglow upgrade, Solana Labs, together with several core development teams within the ecosystem like Anza and Jito, released a more detailed 'Internet Capital Markets (ICM)' roadmap.
In recent years, Solana has attracted a large number of users and DeFi market share due to its low costs and fast transactions. However, the trading-specific chain Hyperliquid has rapidly risen, occupying over 70% of the on-chain contract market. The founder of Hyperliquid even publicly criticized Solana's speed as 'not fast enough.' This undoubtedly makes Solana feel a sense of crisis.
Is Solana still not fast enough?
Currently, final transaction confirmation on Solana takes 12-13 seconds, while Hyperliquid's average confirmation time is about 0.2 seconds, and the average confirmation time on SUI is 0.5 seconds.
It is expected that after the Alpenglow upgrade, Solana's confirmation time will reach 150 milliseconds, reclaiming speed advantages and achieving transaction confirmation capabilities at Visa levels, but still falling short compared to Nasdaq's 'microsecond-level' high-frequency trading systems.
Besides being faster, what else is needed?
Give more power to dApps on the platform—known as ACE (Application-Controlled Execution)—allowing dApps (smart contracts) to decide their transaction priorities, enabling dApps to be more flexible and powerful when handling complex issues.
Protecting market makers and addressing MEV (high-frequency arbitrage attacks such as sandwich bots): Hyperliquid's order matching engine provides higher priority for market maker orders, protecting them from MEV attacks, thus offering better prices and attracting retail investors. Solana ICM's roadmap is similar, with the introduction of BAM and the completion of the Alpenglow upgrade, enabling DEXs within the ecosystem to address the high-frequency arbitrage problem and improve market health, providing better prices for retail investors.
More ambitious goals.
In addition to aligning with Hyperliquid in DeFi, Solana has an even more ambitious goal—truly becoming an 'on-chain Nasdaq'—helping more companies bypass the complicated IPO process for on-chain financing.
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recently stated in an interview that he hopes to complete the on-chain traditional financial asset (RWA) within a year, provide compliant and open-source on-chain IPOs for entrepreneurs within five years, and ultimately create an open, low-cost, decentralized internet capital market.
Ambitious enough, but it seems to be the goal of almost all leading public chains. Currently, we see Solana continuously striving for reform in various aspects such as underlying architecture, ultimate performance, and application scenarios. However, this strategy still requires time and market validation to break through in this highly competitive era.
02. In a tumultuous autumn, how will AI narratives develop?
Public blockchains usually do not easily change their consensus strategies, just as no one would casually change their nationality or residence. Once changes occur, they are often driven by significant threats.
In terms of core chain trading business, whether it is Hyperliquid as a trading-specific chain rapidly eroding Solana's advantages in the DEX perpetual contract market, or the rising star Sui catching up in multiple fields such as DeFi and DeAI as a general-purpose chain, coupled with hot topics like stable coins, RWA, and micro-strategies pushing ETH back to the throne, Solana feels considerable pressure, forcing it to accelerate upgrades to reverse the situation.
The AI field, which Solana prides itself on, is not optimistic either. After the previous DePIN and AI Agent MEME craze faded, the Virtuals ecosystem rose rapidly, giving Base an absolute advantage in the AI Agent field; the BNB Chain, leveraging celebrity effects and exchange resources, diverted a significant amount of AI MEME attention. In terms of decentralized AI infrastructure, the rapid expansion of the Bittensor subnet and the rise of numerous AI Layer 1 projects are gradually forming new forces in the DeAI field.
For a time, anxiety seems to have spread to various levels of the Solana chain, but Solana, having weathered many storms, is certainly not going to give up easily. Currently, the Alpenglow upgrade is expected to bring strong confidence to the ecosystem. At least, Solana's official stance has shown enough humility and pragmatism, clearly benchmarking against competitors, gradually addressing shortcomings, and even aiming to become stronger.
Next, let's summarize Solana's AI ecosystem and see if Solana's AI narrative can still help it usher in a new wave of prosperity.
03. The AI landscape of Solana.
The development time of AI projects on Solana is extensive, and the breadth of the track is vast; it is hard not to be amazed when reviewing them. Here, we can categorize the AI projects on Solana into three phases based on approximate time intervals.
Phase 1: The early DePIN ecosystem erupts, DeAI germinates and grows.
The popularity of the DePIN concept has made Solana one of the earliest public chains to explore on-chain decentralized AI. These projects, relying on Solana's strong performance and low prices, have built their decentralized networks for computing power, bandwidth, data, etc., laying an early foundation for the Solana AI ecosystem.
In terms of AI computing power networks, early projects like Render, io.net, and Aethir were the first to attempt decentralized computing power on-chain, although their focuses differ.
Render focuses on rendering tasks for 3D animation and the metaverse, recording the allocation and payment of rendering tasks on Solana, and matching GPU providers and demanders through smart contracts.
io.net primarily provides low-cost decentralized GPU computing power for AI and machine learning, automatically allocating computing power through its own network, with Solana used for settling $IO tokens and recording node contributions.
Aethir mainly optimizes real-time applications such as games through edge computing, allocating computing power to edge nodes through its own network, with Solana used to record transactions and incentivize with $ATH tokens.
These projects are among the early explorers of the already crowded decentralized computing power network, having raised significant financing as early entrants and receiving positive market outlooks. However, these projects typically require high-performance GPUs to participate in the network, setting a high threshold for ordinary people.
In contrast, Grass, Helium, Roam, and Gradient Network have a relatively solid grassroots foundation.
Grass is a decentralized data collection network where users can automatically contribute bandwidth by downloading browser plugins or applications and collect network data through web crawling and other activities. Users' contributions are recorded on the Solana blockchain and rewarded with $GRASS.
Roam's network aims to provide seamless, secure global internet coverage through community-provided Wi-Fi nodes. Users can earn $ROAM tokens by providing Wi-Fi coverage or validating networks through the app.
Gradient Network is a decentralized edge computing platform where users can contribute idle computing resources (such as phones, laptops, etc.) to support AI inference, content distribution, and serverless functionality by simply installing a plugin, with Solana's on-chain mechanisms handling coordination and payments between devices to ensure efficient and secure decentralized computing.
Helium provides IoT and mobile network coverage in a decentralized manner, using Solana to record hotspot data and transactions. Users purchase and deploy Helium Hotspots (hotspot devices, priced around $200–500) to provide network coverage and earn $HNT or $MOBILE tokens. A more accessible way to participate is through the phone card launched by Helium and T-Mobile in the U.S., enabling the 'network mapping' feature, sharing anonymous location data to help optimize network coverage, earning Cloud Points or $MOBILE tokens, and trying out the phone card for free.
These projects have actively explored the infrastructure area where blockchain and AI intersect (such as bandwidth, data, computing power, etc.), bringing significant imagination and confidence to the market, while further opening a new chapter for DeAI. Although the token prices of these projects have decreased from their peaks, the network effects are still evident, and many projects have already established partnerships with traditional large companies, gaining recognition in mainstream markets.
Phase 2: AI Agent blooms in multiple facets.
With the significant improvement in LLM capabilities represented by ChatGPT, applications like AI Agents have rapidly developed in the past year. Solana, with its exceptional performance and rich ecosystem, has become one of the first public chains to reap the benefits of on-chain AI Agent tokens and related application prosperity.
Wayfinder, developed by Parallel Studios (backed by Solana Ventures, previously known for the chain game Colony on Solana), simplifies cross-chain operations through AI Agents, supporting easy asset transfers between multiple blockchains, including Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, and Base.
ElizaOS is an open-source AI Agent framework that helps developers quickly create, deploy, and manage AI Agents on Solana. These AI Agents can quickly process information, execute transactions, and interact with smart contracts, governed by DAO AI16Z. The DAO token $AI16Z reached a market cap of over $2.5 billion, becoming the leading AI token on Solana. However, due to its strong MEME attributes, its value later returned to rational levels.
Holoworld is a multimodal AI Agent launch platform that allows ordinary people to create, customize, and trade AI Agents, supporting the customization of 3D characters and videos. All digital asset interactions are managed through Solana's smart contracts.
Moby AI was initially an AI Agent focused on alpha research and providing real-time cryptocurrency information. It has now launched its own terminal, focusing on alpha mining and trading on the Solana blockchain.
Hey Anon is a DeFAI protocol deployed on Solana, aiming to simplify DeFi interactions through natural language processing and real-time data aggregation, helping users manage DeFi operations, receive project updates, and analyze market trends.
In addition, many well-known Agent and application projects emerged on the Solana chain during the AI boom earlier this year, such as the Agent framework $ARC, $SWARMS, DeFAI platform $GRIFFAIN, $BUZZ, AI Agent launcher $HAT, and well-known AI Agents $PIPPIN, $ZEREBRO, etc. However, after the tide receded, the token prices and popularity of these projects quickly declined, and some projects' development is at a standstill.
Phase 3: The post-chain AI era, taking a more solid step towards on-chain DeAI.
As the market gradually returns to rationality, we notice that a new batch of projects has emerged on the Solana chain, cleaning up the noise of the AI MEME era and building decentralized AI infrastructure on Solana in a more grounded and feasible manner.
Nous Research is dedicated to training open-source AI models that can compete with mainstream large models like OpenAI through a decentralized approach. Its core Psyche network significantly reduces the frequency of communication between nodes through compression technology, effectively addressing the communication bandwidth bottleneck in decentralized AI training, enabling the network to support high computational demand AI training scenarios like LLM pre-training; and recording node contributions and completing incentive distribution through the Solana network. It has launched the Hermes series of open-source models fine-tuned based on the Llama model.
Arcium was initially a privacy protocol on Solana called Elusiv, but later transformed into a broader privacy computing platform. Using MPC and ZKP technologies, it allows computations on encrypted data without exposing the data content, providing privacy guarantees in Defi, Desci, and also offering privacy infrastructure for AI model training, inference, and AI Agent applications that require attention to training data privacy.
Neutral Trade is a hedge fund platform based on Solana, providing various AI-driven quantitative and automated trading strategies. Currently, in addition to common quantitative neutral strategies and arbitrage strategies, it also features a well-performing CTA Momentum strategy, a multi-asset, high-liquidity strategy operated in collaboration with renowned quantitative firm R* Research, with an annual yield of up to 95.11%, and a subscription limit of ten million dollars has already been filled.
Although the enthusiasm for Solana AI has declined in this phase, there is a sense of natural selection. The quality of projects has significantly improved—greater ability to land, addressing more practical issues—evolving from 'dream orators' to 'pragmatic doers.'
04. How do we view the current AI ecosystem of Solana?
From the above overview, we can see that Solana's AI ecosystem has developed early, covering a wide range of areas, and its comprehensive strength remains very competitive among existing public chains.
In addition to being comprehensive, many excellent projects have emerged in the Solana ecosystem. For example, Nous Research is dedicated to solving the challenges of decentralized large-scale training for AI models, Grass collects massive training data through a decentralized network, and Arcium focuses on building privacy infrastructure. The competing products of these projects often require proprietary chains to support them, while they have developed well on Solana, fully demonstrating Solana's exceptional carrying capacity.
Although the current enthusiasm for on-chain AI has been diverted by Base, BNB Chain, and others, the possibility of a single chain dominating the AI field is almost zero in the long term. The relationship between chains tends to be more about cooperation than competition. At the same time, with the Alpenglow upgrade, Solana's advantages in the AI field will further strengthen:
1. Fast and Economical: Speed, throughput, and costs are the most critical factors for on-chain AI projects. Multiple AI Agents need to closely collaborate and transact under protocols like MCP, while decentralized training, data collection, and other tasks also rely on high-frequency and rapid interactions between nodes. Solana is currently very efficient, and after the Alpenglow upgrade, the confirmation time is reduced to 150 milliseconds, further lowering latency and costs, better supporting real-time AI applications.
2. Good liquidity: As the currency of projects, the stability and smooth circulation of AI tokens significantly impact the projects. Solana currently has an average daily DEX volume of $1.4 billion, ranking second in the entire network behind Ethereum, with mature and active DeFi ecosystems like Raydium and Jito, allowing AI projects to easily access stable liquidity pools. The upgrade is expected to attract more market makers, providing deep liquidity to help AI tokens circulate and finance quickly.
3. Smart contract support: Solana supports parallel processing and more flexible development languages. Its virtual machine SVM can handle complex logic more efficiently, suitable for the more complex on-chain execution required for AI tasks (such as Agent decision-making or data validation). After the Alpenglow upgrade, contract functionality will be stronger, running more stably, making it easier for AI developers to build applications like prediction markets or automated training.
4. Decentralization: Although Solana has long been criticized for 'not being decentralized enough,' this is only because the reference point is Ethereum. Its current more than 2,000 nodes far exceed many popular performance chains and proprietary chains. The Alpenglow upgrade will reduce operational costs, and more nodes are expected to join, further enhancing the level of decentralization and strengthening the AI ecosystem's resistance to censorship and global distribution.
5. Ecological Coordination: As a general-purpose chain, the ecosystem on Solana is more complete, diverse, and mature, making it easier for AI projects to collaborate across fields. For example, AI Agents use the DePIN computing power network for seamless interaction with on-chain RWA assets. A comprehensive ecosystem can easily empower AI projects.
05. In conclusion.
In the crypto space, we are always particularly excited about the birth of narratives while also anxious about their demise. Solana, filled with memes, is a master of narratives. 'On-chain Nasdaq' and AI are undoubtedly its two most important narratives.
The arrival of the Alpenglow upgrade is highly anticipated. At that time, Solana, which once fought Ethereum and the entire Layer 2 ecosystem on its own, will become even stronger. But will it be strong enough to carry these two narratives and compete with more general-purpose and proprietary chains? Perhaps only time will tell.
