This is a segment of the Lightspeed Bulletin. To read full editions, subscribe.
When President Trump launched Trump’s Memecoin on the eve of his inauguration, he did it in the Solana block chain.
Memecoins, which are Kokey cryptographic tokens that vibrations -based trade are currently the most popular use for Solana. The long -term vision of the network, so that capital markets were housed within a shared global system, is much broader than that. Solana’s possibility of achieving this comes largely from her speed and cheap transaction rates, which is why Memecoin merchants like so much.
Solana is a block chain, and a block chain is a decentralized book of digital assets. Each bank operates a major asset book, but accounting books do not work very well together. They are often slow and expensive to move money because banks and other existing asset books use inefficient infrastructure.
Block chains are formed by global computers that execute software that guarantees that the main asset book is precise, which can be expensive. It costs more than one dollar on average transact on the Bitcoin network, and costs $ 0.05 on average buying something in Ethereum. In addition, Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the largest and seconder block chains, only process a few stabs of transactions per second. Credit cards managed an average of 1,700 transactions per second in 2023, according to Capital One data.
The main architect of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, was a software engineer at the Qualcomm wireless technology firm. Yakovenko struggled to make blockchains faster and cheaper when realizing some principles of wireless technology that could be applied to Blockchain, which led him to the creation of Solana. Yakovenko raised risk capital funds and began building the block chain along with a couple of co -founders.
Solana was launched in 2020. The key innovation of the block chain was to create “history test”, a term used to describe a type of watch that each validator, the people who execute the computers with the solana software, are used for Process Solana transactions faster than them. I could otherwise.
Sol, which is also known as Solana, is the cryptographic token issued and used to ensure the Solana network. People can also buy and sell sun, as they do.
When people make transactions in Solana, they pay a rate called in sun. This is usually a fraction of a penny used in part to compensate for validators to execute the Solana software. For the sake of comparison, credit cards generally charge 1.5-3.5% of a transaction to the merchant, a cost that is transmitted to consumers.
Solana is also much faster than Bitcoin or Ethereum, driving more than 1,000 transactions per second. Theoretically it could manage even more demand for the Solana Assets Book.
Solana has had some interruptions, events in which the validators stopped producing blocks due to an error in the software. The last time Solana stopped was on February 6, 2024. These interruptions were caused in part due to the lack of diversity of Solana clients, which is a way of saying that there is basically a version of the Solana software. So, if there is an error in the code, each validator is affected. There is a second Solana client that is written from scratch called Fordancencer, but it is not ready.
FTX, an encryption exchange that declared bankruptcy and knocked down the entire cryptography market, was one of the first to adopt Solana. Solana’s reputation was very affected after her collapse, and the sun price was submerged for less than $ 10 at the end of 2022. Surprisingly, the network survived and had a roaring return in 2024. Sun reached a historical maximum of $ 293 After Donald Trump launched a memory in January 2025.
President Trump is not the only person who uses Solana for Memecoins. For all purposes, Memecoin Trading is currently the main use for the Book of Solana Assets. The commerce of these volatile tokens is more or less a game, and some hit Solana for their entanglement of Memecoin. Others argue that less refined use cases can help technology to climb for more serious ones, citing how the demand for online pornography forced broadband capacity to expand and create the modern Internet.
The most serious use case that Solana expects is what Blockchain supporters call Internet capital markets. The idea is that Solana could allow all kinds of assets (memecoras but also actions, bonds, tokenized raw materials, whatever, negotiate within the same system. This is partly attributed to the fact that all solana data is available for All network participants, which is something that Solana developers call global shared state.
That future is still on one side, of course, but with its speed and low rates, Solana has a chance as good as any block chain of achieving it.
Start his day with the best ideas of Crypto by David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire Bulletin.
Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, politics and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the forward orientation bulletin.
Get Alpha directly on your entrance tray with the 0XRESARCH Bulletin: Market outstanding, graphics, commercial ideas of Degen, governance updates and more.
The Lightspeed Bulletin is everything related to Solana, in its entrance tray, every day. Subscribe to the newspaper Solana News by Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.