Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has said that he wants the blockchain to be the go-to system for global finance. Yakovenko explained that Solana's speed could eliminate market inefficiencies.
“This is like my sci-fi end goal for Solana. When news travels around the world, state transitions travel at the same speed as the news. By the time the news reaches a Bloomberg terminal in New York, the price of whatever he was pondering is already spreading through Solana," Yakovenko told Scott Melker.
"So when a trader looks at a market on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) or Solana, it’s the same price. It means that real arbitrage is not allowed. That will require a lot of work. We joke that if we have to, we’ll build neutrino-based communication between nodes to go through the center of the earth and reduce latency.”
Yakovenko added that the blockchain needed a breakthrough to become a mainstream network, which comes in the form of a big app built on the blockchain. Yakovenko said if the big app had 100 million users, it would have a global "transformative force."
The biggest obstacle that Solana currently faces is a network outage. A report in early September revealed that the network had experienced five full or partial outages in 2022. Yakovenko said that the outages were the consequences of the network’s low-fee transactions.
“That’s been, I guess, our curse, but it’s because the network is so cheap and fast that there are enough users and applications that are driving that,” Yakovenko said.
Launched in 2020, Solana’s longest outage happened in September 2021 when the network’s validators were not able to process high-volume transactions during peak hours, halting the block production for 17 hours.
Its latest outage happened this June, which lasted slightly over four hours. A bug disrupted the network’s operation, resulting in a 14 percent price dip.
Yakovenko explained that Solana’s “failure case” was different from other blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, because Solana works faster. He said that a two-hour block production halt in the Bitcoin network in the past did not affect it significantly, but would be detrimental if happened in Solana.
SOL’s recent uptrend
Data on September 13 showed that SOL rose by 4 percent to $39—its best value in the last three weeks. In the first two weeks of September, the token gained a total of 30 percent. The growth of SOL reportedly exceeded BTC and ETH, which gained 16 percent and 22 percent within the same period, respectively.
Analysts noted several reasons for the token’s recent uptrend. At the end of August, Helium, a company that provides decentralized 5G network coverage, announced that it would migrate to the Solana network. Helium explained that the migration would “improve operational efficiency and scalability.”
There was also an increase in transaction volumes across various NFT marketplaces, including OpenSea and Magic Eden. Last week, Nansen reported that the NFT transaction reached a weekly value of 1.2 million SOL (approximately $42.8 million).
The SOL/USD pairs have also shown a flat trendline since May 23, which encourages investors because a drop toward the token’s support point is usually followed by a bounce toward the resistant point by 58 to 60 percent, meaning that the price is relatively stable.