Uweb famous teacher's cutting-edge course 89th Sol's next hot spot, the following is the interactive highlights of Uweb President Yu Jianing @Uwebdryu and Solana developer Xuan Rui @lvxuan147, Enjoy:
1. Solana is user-centric and focuses on ecological compatibility and scalability, which contrasts with ETH's academic infrastructure construction.
There are many "ETH killer" projects that have emerged, such as Polygon and Avalanche, but only Solana has really stood out in the current cycle, and the reason behind this is inseparable from its public chain ecology and founders. The best way to evaluate a chain is to pay attention to the dynamics of its founders, especially their speeches on social media: ETH founder Vitalik Buterin and Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko often express their views on social media. By directly reading the content of these founders, you can gain an in-depth understanding of their vision and strategy for the public chain.

From the perspective of "temperament", ETH is more academic and focuses on the construction of infrastructure, especially in the construction of a secure settlement layer. The ETH Foundation is also a very academic organization. They are committed to building a solid infrastructure and pay less attention to the needs of end users. Solana emphasizes practicality, user obsession and product orientation, and its developers pay great attention to user experience.

From the perspective of Solana developers, Solana's focus on user threshold and user experience is second to none. Although Solana has attracted widespread attention for its Meme culture, many people believe that it cannot attract and retain users, but this view does not see Solana's true advantages. The wealth effect and market volatility of Meme often obscure Solana's strong technical engineering capabilities and innovation capabilities. The Solana ecosystem focuses on composability, which enables projects to overlap with each other to form a strong network effect. Take http://Pump.fun as an example. Its underlying layer is connected to AMM and then directs liquidity to Raydium. The C-end uses Jito anti-pinch and Jupiter to purchase at the same time, which also brings vitality to Jito and Jupiter. This product composability makes the entire ecosystem more dynamic and scalable.

In contrast, many DApps on ETH are independently developed but have difficulty forming similar network effects. ETH's Layer 1 is mainly responsible for secure settlement, while the liquidity and resources of each Layer 2 are dispersed. The Solana ecosystem is more like Lego blocks, and the combination of projects makes it more flexible and has more expansion potential.

2. Solana has been criticized for being centralized, but it has two sides. Centralization can also bring better user experience and technological innovation.
The ETH Foundation official Twitter is more like a scientist, while the Solana official Twitter should be a model for all public chains. The Solana Foundation not only leads users to explore innovation, but also delivers fun, unique products and narratives.
Solana has been criticized for being highly centralized, which is actually a two-sided problem: although Solana does have centralized characteristics in some aspects, its advantages also lie in this. The leaders of the Solana ecosystem have a high degree of attention to products and user experience, which is an important force driving Solana forward. From the perspective of developers, Solana is the only blockchain that can rival Web2 in user experience, and it may take a few years for young public chains to build an ecosystem with network effects like Solana to catch up.

At present, the criticism of Solana mainly focuses on downtime, price fluctuations, and chip distribution. For those who preach decentralization every day, we should be vigilant. Decentralization can have different levels and can be achieved technically, but people cannot be decentralized: Solana has always been very centralized in software engineering capabilities, which cannot be decentralized; although there are people who support decentralization, many final decisions are still made in a centralized environment. All POS chains have experienced similar challenges, but Solana's resilience has made it more decentralized after a crisis. The core team of the Solana Foundation is the most product- and user-oriented among the blockchain founders, and it is their leadership that has driven Solana to its current height.

Solana has demonstrated great resilience through continuous optimization of its PoH consensus mechanism. After many challenges, Solana has remained stable and has produced star projects such as Jupiter, Jito, Magiceden, and Phantom. In the current blockchain field, no other public chain can reach Solana's level in terms of user experience and technical engineering capabilities. In contrast, emerging public chains are still in a very early stage of development, and the ecosystem is not yet mature, which is difficult to compare with the overall strength of Solana, which has experienced such hardships.

There are many billion-dollar companies in the Solana ecosystem, and these star products are centered around Solana's powerful ecosystem. This ecosystem not only has strong technical innovation capabilities, but also can solve practical user experience problems. Solana is obsessed with software engineering and user product polishing.

As a Layer 1 competition, it is far from enough to just launch the mainnet and complete basic operations. The key is to build an ecosystem that includes 10 to 12 star products, just like planets around the earth, to jointly promote the prosperity of the ecosystem. The Solana ecosystem can achieve this network effect and drive the vigorous development of the entire ecosystem. Solana's infrastructure has been completed by 80%, and only the last 20% of application-level promotion, such as payment, social, consumer applications and other application scenarios, will open up the final user growth.

3. Firedancer is a new type of validator client developed for the Solana blockchain, developed by the Jump Trading team. Unlike the native client currently used by Solana Labs, which is written in Rust, Firedancer is written entirely from scratch in C++.
Firedancer was originally designed to significantly improve Solana's transaction processing capabilities. Theoretically, Firedancer's ability to process millions of transactions is comparable to traditional WeChat payments and Paypal payments, making Solana potentially the most attractive Web3 public chain platform for institutional and retail participants in the future.

At the same time, Solana Foundation Chairman Lily recently promoted a new concept - PayFi, which is a new financial market created around the time value of money. This on-chain financial market can achieve new financial paradigms and product experiences that traditional finance cannot achieve. If the current Web3 payment is mainly to use the money on hand to make transactions, then PayFi allows us to use tomorrow's money to make transactions. Simply put, it is similar to the "Sesame Credit" on the chain, realizing the "pay later" model. PayFi has the potential to serve as a bridge between traditional finance and the Web3 world, breaking through the barriers between on-chain and off-chain assets.

4. Blink transforms Web2 links into Web3 transactions by simplifying operations, revolutionizing front-end interaction
Blink is still in the early developer development stage, and has only realized 10% to 20% of its potential on the user side, and many application scenarios have not yet been fully explored. The full name of Blink is Blockchain Links, which aims to transform the links of the Web2 era into Web3 transaction interactions by innovating the way of links. The core of this technology is that users can complete Web3 transactions on platforms such as Twitter through ordinary links without installing wallet plug-ins, rendering regular links into Blockchain Links, so that Web3 platforms also have Web3 transaction functions.

In this way, Blink transforms traditional social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook into Crypto platforms, such as Crypto Twitter and Crypto Instagram. This transformation allows users to naturally transition to the Web3 environment without changing their usage habits, thereby reducing the complexity of interaction and lowering the entry barrier for users.
Although Blink still has room for improvement in front-end user experience, rendering speed, and platform support, as the technology matures, Blinks has the potential to redefine the way of front-end interaction. The ultimate goal is to enable users to complete operations such as Mint, Swap, Staking, etc. on social platforms without the need for independent official websites or applications. Blink is seen as a key technology for the future in the Solana ecosystem. OKX Wallet has now launched Blink for ETH, and some BTC teams are also working on Blink for the BTC ecosystem. As a paradigm-level innovation, Blink has lowered the entry threshold for Web3 and made it more user-friendly, promoting the wider adoption of the Solana ecosystem on the Web2 platform. Blinks has become a new paradigm for front-end interaction.

5. In the past, the competition among public chains was mainly concentrated between chains, but Solana will compete with Web2 platforms in the future to create a new user experience.
Antatoly's community philosophy emphasizes not only building applications, but also focusing on the coupling and composability between applications. Solana's focus in the second half of the year will be on payment platforms and financial services. In the Solana ecosystem, PayFi not only connects payment scenarios, but also combines payment functions with other application scenarios to create a new user experience. A typical example is the combination of PayFi and DePIN: DePIN is the consumer application layer, and PayFi is the payment layer. In particular, PYUSD issued by PayPal on Solana is the first time that PYUSD has been issued on a chain other than ETH. The ultimate goal of Solana's combination of payment scenarios and consumer DApps is to provide users with a smoother and richer experience. At the same time, these payment scenarios will also be connected with the traditional financial system to produce a powerful composability effect. The US DePIN project is also integrating Solana's payment solutions to improve its ecosystem. Combining payment with financial scenarios and consumer scenarios, composability-based technological innovation will be a brand new user experience.

6.Solana and ETH complement each other. Solana focuses on mobile and DApp integration to promote Web3 innovation and ecological coordination
Solana and ETH are not replacements, but rather they promote each other in different directions. The teams of ETH and Solana focus on different things, which has led to a positive interaction between them in the blockchain ecosystem. ETH founder Vitalik Buterin also emphasized the importance of ETH applications in his speech at ED Con in July.

The reason why Base, which is currently performing well in the ETH ecosystem, performs well is that it has sufficient funds and that its layout in innovation is based on long-term planning for the next two to three years, or even three to five years. To judge the long-term value of a chain, we should not only look at short-term prices, but more importantly, its technological innovation and engineering capabilities. Currently, there are relatively few Layer2 chains that have such technical capabilities for continuous innovation within 3 to 5 years. In contrast, although other chains have performed well in terms of liquidity and token sales, they are still insufficient in large-scale technological innovation, and most of them just maintain the operation of the existing ecosystem.

As a single chain, Solana's biggest advantage is that it can centralize the entire ecosystem to achieve a high degree of centralization and composability, thereby promoting the coordinated development of the entire ecosystem. The key to Solana's future lies in how Solana can implement the "Mobile First" strategy and promote the transition to the mobile terminal. At present, the competition on the web side has become dull, but the mobile side is an untapped blue ocean and the second growth curve of each ecosystem.

Similar to the concept of "mobile phone as wallet" proposed by Vitalik, Solana's Sega2 will become the largest DePIN in Web3. Combining hardware and software, it can realize many innovations that are only possible on Solana. Blink's potential is also underestimated. The differentiation of the web side is not obvious, but combining Blink with the mobile side, especially with many built-in applications, can achieve a differentiated user experience.

Therefore, the competition in public chains is no longer just flat but multi-dimensional, including cross-platform and large-scale user application scenarios. The biggest excitement for Solana developers lies in the intensified competition on the mobile side, as well as the integration of DApps in the Solana ecosystem and the release of composable effects. The "Mobile First" slogan proposed by Solana a few years ago is gradually showing its importance. With the launch of mobile terminals of major star DApps in the second half of the year, Solana's layout on the mobile side will bring more innovations and opportunities.

7. As a paradigm-level innovation, Blink can achieve true user-driven and community-driven by integrating on-chain and off-chain payments and social relationships.
The consumption concept in Web3 has not yet been fully formed. Except for a few examples such as MEME, which can be regarded as "consumer products" on the chain, most projects still focus on making money and lack real user consumption habits. By integrating payment systems and consumer applications, the realization of Web3 e-commerce can be promoted. This does not rely on the issuance of new coins, but through existing infrastructure, such as the settlement system on Solana, to provide services and scenarios.

In Blink's application scenarios, it is feasible to sell services or tools through Blink without issuing new coins. Blink can be used to sell payment-based services, such as paid public courses. After users pay through Blink, they can obtain the right to participate. This payment and consumption model based on existing tokens is expected to open up new business models in Web3, rather than relying solely on speculation and tokenization.

Solana has performed very well in connecting on-chain and off-chain payment and consumption application scenarios, and Blink+ mobile is the most ideal choice for this model.

Twitter's social data is seriously underestimated. By using this social data to complete payments through Blink, although it is displayed as a transaction in the background, the connection between social data and blockchain addresses can be opened in the future. For example, most of the current airdrops are based on addresses. When designing token distribution, it is not based on addresses, but on social relationships. Social relationships are more difficult to forge than current addresses, which improves the authenticity of airdrops and the community-driven effect. Many project parties rely on fake addresses or robots, but by integrating Twitter's social data, based on real social graphs and relationships, consumption scenarios and applications can be built more effectively. When Solana developers design products, they always emphasize real users.

8. Blink is more suitable for precise users with trust relationships; TON platform is aimed at a wider range of users across regions/identities, each with its own social and market advantages
TON has its own unique ecosystem, and its social logic is mainly based on the interaction between strangers. Twitter and WeChat are more inclined to social interaction based on acquaintances, so they are more suitable for building brands and trust relationships. Blink on Twitter is similar to Tmall, while the TON platform is more like Pinduoduo.

TON's advantage lies in its stranger social model, which can break the original identity and organizational structure and establish connections with strangers. This model makes TON's user base larger and more pervasive, while the users on Blink are precise users with trust relationships and higher net worth. Therefore, TON is more suitable for covering a wider market, while Blink is more suitable for marketing to precise users.

*This article is for learning and sharing purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice.