In 2019, Solana's CEO Daniel Albert left Qualcomm, leading a group of professionals well-versed in distributed systems, cellular networks, and mobile networking technology, starting Solana's entrepreneurial journey in a basement in San Francisco. With the technical strength of his team, Solana quickly gained support from top crypto investment institutions a16z, Polychain, and Multicoin Capital, laying a solid foundation for the project's development.
In March 2020, Solana officially launched, with its initial coin price relatively low and not attracting widespread attention in the market, around $1 at that time.
As the project progressed and technology improved, Solana's ecosystem began to enrich gradually, attracting more developers and users. By early 2021, the price of SOL began to show a significant upward trend, rising from around $1 to about $10.
FTX, as the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange at the time, had its founder SBF favoring Solana, not only personally investing in it but also creating the star project Serum, which provided strong liquidity support for Solana, significantly enhancing its visibility and influence.
In 2021, the cryptocurrency market experienced a bull market. Solana stood out among numerous blockchain projects due to its high-performance 'Proof of History' consensus mechanism and close collaboration with FTX. A massive influx of capital into the Solana ecosystem propelled its coin price from around $10 at the beginning of the year to a historical high of $260.43 in November, an increase of over 22,000%, with its market capitalization once exceeding $100 billion, making it one of the most dazzling stars in the cryptocurrency market at that time.
During this period, applications on the Solana chain emerged like mushrooms after rain, such as decentralized finance projects Raydium, Orca, Marinade Finance, non-fungible token markets Degenerate Ape Academy, Solana Monkey Business, as well as decentralized cloud storage platform Akash Network, and decentralized music streaming platform Audius. A large and vibrant ecosystem gradually formed, further driving up the price of SOL.
In 2022, the cryptocurrency market entered a bear market. FTX faced severe liquidity crises in November due to overexpansion, poor risk management, and allegations of misappropriating customer funds, ultimately declaring bankruptcy.
As a project strongly supported by FTX, Solana faced a tremendous impact. Many investors lost confidence in Solana due to FTX's bankruptcy, selling off their SOL tokens, which caused the price of SOL to plummet sharply from around $260 to about $8 in just a few months, marking a new low in three years. Solana's market capitalization also significantly shrank, with many projects in the ecosystem facing severe issues such as funding shortages and user loss, plunging the entire ecosystem into distress.
In the face of difficulties, the Solana team did not give up but actively took measures to respond. They increased investment in technological research and development, upgrading the 'Proof of History' consensus mechanism to further enhance the network's security and stability.
At the same time, by hosting various hackathons and developer incentive programs, more developers were attracted to join, continuously optimizing infrastructure, encouraging the development of innovative applications, and promoting the recovery and prosperity of the ecosystem. For example, meme coins on Solana began to rise in 2023, with platforms like pumpfun enabling projects to launch rapidly, achieving seamless transitions between internal and external markets, attracting a large influx of users and capital, injecting new vitality into the development of the Solana network.
In 2024, Solana gradually emerged from its low point, with the coin price steadily rising and the ecosystem slowly recovering vitality. On July 29, Solana broke historical records, achieving new highs in trading volume, fees, and income over the past 24 hours, surpassing Ethereum to become the number one public blockchain. By July 30, Solana's TVL had reached approximately $5.5 billion, more than tripling since the beginning of 2024.
As of today, according to Defillama data, on November 22, 2024, Solana's total locked value (TVL) is $8.74 billion, an increase of approximately 23.76 times from $353 million in October 2023.#公链 #SOL
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