Solana Breakpoint 2022 Key Takeaways

One of the conference’s key topics was NFTs, as Solana is a fast-growing crypto ecosystem for non-fungible tokens. It is the second largest blockchain by NFT sales volume just behind Ethereum. Solana in September posted higher daily trades volumes than Ethereum according to Delphi Digital. This year, its NFT-collections like DeGods and y00ts were trading at thousands of dollars on the secondary market despite adverse market conditions. 

In light of this context, Beeple (the creator of “Everydays: the First 5000 Days”, which was purchased for 69.35 million dollars in 2021) decided to move the release of new artworks from Ethereum to Solana. Stephen Hess, CEO of the Metaplex Studios marketplace, which created the NFT standard and protocol for Solana, announced that it would launch “immersive 3D NFTs” from Beeple on Solana.

Beeple will work on new NFTs in partnership with the Render Network, a platform that allows users to access remote rendering powers via a decentralized peer-to-peer network.. As part of the artist's new project, users will also be invited to create their own unique NFTs using a “Beeple Everyday”. 

In December last year, Render Network managed to raise $30 million in a funding round with participants including the Solana Foundation and Alameda Research.

At the conference, Google Cloud also announced it will be indexing Solana data, bringing it to its BigQuery data warehouse starting in 2023. In addition, the cloud server giant will introduce capabilities to make it easier for users to run their nodes on the Solana blockchain with the Blockchain Node Engine. This led to an explosion in price with the native SOL coin rising to $38, but the momentum didn't last long.

USDC stablecoin issuer Circle has announced its cooperation with Solana. The co-founders of the company said they will launch stablecoin Euro Coin on the Solana blockchain in 2023. It's currently live on the Ethereum blockchain.  In addition, Circle representatives have mentioned that they will bring their newly-developed Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol to Solana.

The Solana ecosystem’s developers are working on creating products for mass adoption. The Saga smartphone, which will be the world’s first Web3-oriented phone, is just one example. The Solana App Store will also be launched and it will be free. During the conference, the importance of open communication with users on the next generation of the Internet was emphasized. 

Solana experienced significant difficulties in 2022, despite new potentially profitable deals and developments. Solana experienced network instability, the collapse of the SOL native token (-86.9% from its all-time high in 2021), reduced liquidity, and massive withdrawals of tokens from staking. According to Defi Llama, $968 million has been blocked in the Solana blockchain. The comparable amounts on the Avalanche and Ethereum blockchains are $1.31 billion and $32.29 billion, respectively.

However, Solana has not been the only one affected by the crypto winter, other blockchains have also suffered similar losses. The whole sector of decentralized finance has taken a step back in terms of direction compared to last year.

But most of all users worry about another point. Blockchain is criticized for repeated shutdowns. Over the past two years, Solana's network has experienced hours of downtime several times. For example, in September 2021, the blockchain was down for 18 hours. In 2022, as many as 4 large-scale failures occurred, the last of which was due to an error in the deployment of the node. 

According to Anatoly Yakovenko, a network co-founder, a blockchain update is forthcoming, which will ensure such incidents do not occur again.

It is also problematic that new Layer1-blockchains like Aptos and Sui can compete with Solana in the speed of transaction execution. In 2022, Aptos raised $150 million in funding and Sui $300 million.

There are many positive developments awaiting the network, as evidenced by the Breakpoint conference. Despite some shortcomings, successful companies, talented artists, and progressive projects are all eager to use the Solana blockchain.