Today, Solana is hazily charting a path through an incredibly competitive environment, mountains of on-chain activity, and growing fears about the protocol’s decentralization. Once the network erupted with activity for 48 consecutive hours. This surge was powered largely by the success of President Donald Trump’s Official Trump TRUMP/USD token, bringing in a staggering $30 billion of decentralized exchange (DEX) volume. However, despite this boom and other encouraging metrics, Solana contends with pressures from the broader blockchain ecosystem as well as issues affecting the network itself.
Solana’s price is up 80% so far in 2024 and the network saw more than $364 billion in transaction volume in early 2025. The network currently has a $12 billion stablecoin supply and partnerships with Fortune 500 companies including Visa, PayPal, and Shopify. The ecosystem is still doing only around 3,000 tx/sec right now. Given this aggressive trajectory for SOL’s price, a recent report found SOL undervalued by as much as 1080% assuming a more modest discount rate.
This optimism is tempered by promising risks, most notably potential network outages and inflation. Solana’s extreme dependence on meme coins makes it incredibly vulnerable to the broader market melt down.
One major concern is decentralization. With 1,314 validators, Solana's network is significantly smaller than Ethereum's, which has 1,064,480 validators. The existence of such a huge disparity thus makes one question Solana’s resiliency and security by design.
To improve decentralization, Solana may reduce the cost of onboarding validators, potentially through foundation subsidies.
The risk Competition from other blockchain platforms presents a risk. Sui’s transaction fees at $0.006 take a stab at Solana’s advantage in transaction costs. Now, with its deep integration into Telegram, TON provides an attractive option for users looking for an experience closely tied to social media.
Layer 2 solutions like Base and newer Layer 1 networks such as Sui, TON and Monad present growing competition due to their strong technical performance and growing adoption.
Solana is doing earnest work to mitigate these challenges and create a more diverse ecosystem.
To diversify network usage and reduce reliance on speculative trading, the foundation and related venture capital firms are investing in more fundamentally sound sectors, such as DePIN and AI.
Solana’s recent effort to increase its network resilience by encouraging the development and adoption of alternative validator clients illustrates this point.
Further resilience can be achieved by accelerating the development and adoption of alternative validator clients, such as FireDancer.
