With a market capitalization of $150 billion, it could rank among the top 50 publicly listed companies globally, equivalent to 1 trillion RMB.
Solana once touched this threshold due to a surge—what is it really relying on?
In 2017, a former Qualcomm engineer (a chip expert) led a team to create Solana. The goal was simple: Bitcoin transfers take 10 minutes, Ethereum transaction fees often exceed hundreds of dollars, which is too expensive! They wanted to create a chain that is 'fast and cheap'.
In 2020, after the mainnet launched, it indeed exploded: with a technology called 'Proof of History' (no need to understand the principle, just remember the conclusion), it could process tens of thousands of transactions per second (while Ethereum could only handle a dozen at that time), and transaction fees were as low as a few dimes, with transfers being 'instantaneous'.
In 2021, during that big bull market, SOL became the most eye-catching asset:
- The price skyrocketed from $1.5 to $260, increasing over 170 times in 2 years, with market capitalization soaring to hundreds of billions;
- The chain was filled with people: NFT minting fees were 200 times cheaper than Ethereum, DeFi platforms (like Raydium) were overwhelmed with daily orders, and even FTX founder SBF publicly called it an 'Ethereum killer' to rally support;
- Back then, casually buying any small token related to SOL could double in days, and the whole circle was shouting 'Solana ecosystem YYDS'.
In 2022, the collapse of FTX and the chill of the bear market.
In November 2022, FTX declared bankruptcy due to insolvency, and Solana, as a heavily invested asset of FTX, was sold off, causing the SOL price to plummet to $8, with market capitalization shrinking by over 90%. Market skepticism about Solana reached its peak, with even claims of 'Solana is dead'.
In 2023, technological breakthroughs and ecological recovery.
- In 2023, Solana launched the Sealevel parallelization engine, increasing the smart contract execution speed by three times and reducing gas fees by 72%, attracting a large number of Ethereum developers to migrate.
- Institutional Entry: Institutions like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton began piloting the tokenization of U.S. Treasury bonds on Solana, with the RWA (Real World Assets) ecosystem starting to take shape.
In 2024, meme frenzy and ecological fission.
- In 2024, Solana completely became the meme amusement park of the crypto world, with an extreme performance of 700,000 TPS and a transaction fee of $0.0001, becoming a breeding ground for meme coins.
- The emergence of the Pump.fun platform (which generated over $500 million in a bull market) directly ignited creative enthusiasm, allowing users to generate tokens with just a few clicks, resulting in a total of 455,000 new tokens created over 24 years, with 80% being meme coins.
Phenomenal meme carnival
- Bonk ($BONK): Solana's first community-driven meme coin, achieving a 100-fold increase through airdrops and the BonkSwap trading platform, with its market value once exceeding $3 billion. Its viral spread even triggered a rush to buy 'Solana phones'—users could earn extra token rewards by purchasing phones with the Solana wallet.
- Dogwifhat ($WIF): Broke out with the narrative of 'Dogecoin + NFT', with a peak trading volume of $520 million in 24 hours, maintaining second place in Solana meme coins, and launched virtual pet breeding gameplay in collaboration with NFT projects like (DeGods).
- The universal minting movement: Ordinary users created an average of 12,000 types of tokens daily, with meme coins becoming the most active social currency on the Solana chain.
In 2025, the king of performance and the empire of ecology.
In 2025, Solana completed its transformation from a 'technical dark horse' to a global digital economic infrastructure, maintaining third place in cryptocurrency market capitalization ($80 billion) with a modular architecture and 100,000 TPS performance. On-chain daily active users surpassed 12 million, surpassing Ethereum to become the number one chain for NFT transactions ($3.4 billion quarterly trading volume).
- DeFi dominance: Total locked value (TVL) reached $10.2 billion, surpassing BSC to become the second-largest DeFi public chain globally. Kamino Finance's interest rate swap protocol saw a trading volume exceeding $1.7 billion in its first week, and Maple Finance's tokenized U.S. Treasury products attracted $2.3 billion in institutional funds.
- The rise of the RWA empire: CMBMINT, a mutual recognition fund tokenization product launched by CMB International, and on-chain assets managed by BlackRock surpassed $50 billion, covering fields like carbon credits and real estate. The Dubai Land Department piloted property rights tokenization, supporting on-chain fractional ownership transactions.
- Web3.0 infrastructure takes shape: The Solaxy Layer2 network boosts TPS to 10,000, while the Ignite Protocol allows users to issue compliant tokens at low cost in three minutes; Jupiter collaborates with the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange for dual listings of stocks, and traditional companies issue on-chain stocks simultaneously during IPOs.
Now in 2025, Solana is no longer a single public chain, but a parallel universe composed of DeFi, NFT, RWA, AI, and gaming.
History is a guide to understanding rise and fall. Look for those ecosystems and industry trends that allow ordinary people to use them effortlessly, truly solving problems—history always hides the next opportunity within similar logic. I hope everyone can seize the next hundred-fold, trillion-dollar SOL.