Original title: Solana Foundation 2025 Marketing Memo
Author: akshaybd
Translated by: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's note: The hot performance of Solana in this cycle, with intense meme trading on-chain and continuously rising token prices, can be attributed to the Solana Foundation's focus on enhancing infrastructure performance and reducing latency to meet market demands, driving the growth of founders, applications, and tokenized projects.
The following is the original content (for ease of reading and understanding, the original content has been reorganized):
Internet Capital Markets and F.A.T. Protocol Engineering
Solana's commitment is to allow anyone with an internet connection to participate in capital markets. Nowadays, you just need to download a wallet or an application, click a few buttons, and you can join the internet capital market— a globally accessible ledger that can tokenize entities, currencies, and cultures.
Why does this matter?
It helps us create a world where anyone can have assets anytime and anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection. These assets can be global companies, real estate, commodities, or even cultural expressions. This lays the foundation for 'Universal Basic Ownership'. The competition for high-performance L1 is not just to establish a decentralized Nasdaq, but to create an internet-native successor to Nasdaq— a capital market with better accessibility, lower latency, and shared global liquidity.
The opportunity is both simple and enormous: Currently, only about 15% of the global population can participate in the U.S. capital markets— the most liquid market in the world. Many other countries' capital markets lack liquidity, have high entry costs, and inefficient settlement. The cryptocurrency market is more accessible and liquid. At peak times, its trading volume even exceeds NASDAQ and NYSE, and we have the opportunity to build the best capital market on the internet.
In the future, companies will list directly 'on the internet' and be able to reach more than a billion investors holding private keys— voting with their funds to decide the future they want. This is not limited to stocks but includes all valuable asset classes, cultures, and ideas.
How to accelerate towards this future?
This is what F.A.T. protocol engineering is about; in the past, this industry was largely built on the idea that 'value would primarily concentrate at the infrastructure layer' (Fat Protocols, 2016). Eight years later, we are still building infrastructure because it often attracts higher valuations.
In contrast, Solana's ecosystem chooses to bet on products, as reflected in the Breakpoint conference in 2024. By focusing on founders, applications, and tokenization, Solana's market share in trading fees— an excellent indicator of ecosystem activity and overall health—grew by 1,489% in 2024, reaching 12%.
F = Founders, rather than just developers
Now, for a group of determined founders, it has never been easier and faster to go from startup in a garage to a billion-dollar company, just by having an internet connection.
1.tensor: Two founders from Canada, company valuation $445 million
2.pump.fun: A UK team that achieved $155 million in fee revenue in 8 months
3.birdeye: Headquartered in Vietnam, with 24 million users by 2024
The startup flywheel will continue to run at high speed in 2025, and the colosseum hackathon (Solana's hackathon) is the largest talent discovery and development program in the crypto space, with past participants having raised a cumulative $650 million.
This flywheel benefits from an ecosystem built for scalability: from the hub of superteam, the workspace of shipyard, to the solanaturbine accelerator, community-led infrastructure further speeds up the growth rate of founders.
A = Applications, rather than just infrastructure
Infrastructure represents uncertain optimism, while applications represent certain optimism. The Solana ecosystem prioritizes products that users truly need; what is the result?
In just October of this year, application revenue reached $73 million, a year-on-year increase of 185 times, now leading all networks. Moreover, 74% of the funds in the ecosystem flowed into applications (compared to 40% for Ethereum), as the founders followed users' needs.
Solana has always held the philosophy that what matters is not TVL, but the gathering place of economic activity. Chain GDP (revenue generated by applications) is the main indicator of a protocol's long-term success. When the revenue generated by applications exceeds the underlying layer, it indicates that the protocol layer has achieved product-market fit. If your infrastructure layer is exploitative, applications will leave and build their own chains or migrate to others.
Study the Laffer Curve.
T = Tokenization, rather than just TVL
TVL is a passive, self-referential metric. Active metrics like capital efficiency and trading volume are more instructive. More importantly, the end goal is: Solana is the best platform for the issuance of internet assets. In the past 6 months, we have witnessed the issuance of 2.6 million tokens, accounting for 78% of the total across all chains. While Memes may occupy a large share of public consciousness, they are not the only things that are growing.
The treasury balance has doubled to $134 million, stablecoins grew by 120% to about $4 billion, and it also includes 4,200 physical assets from BAXUSco and dvinlabs, 190 million digital collectibles from drip haus, and over 1 million hotspots from helium— these are just a few examples.
With the follow-up of adoption, tools, and regulation, hyper-tokenization will accelerate development— becoming a globally accessible ledger where all assets will be tokenized.
Each component of F.A.T. mutually reinforces: more founders launch products, more products attract users, more users drive more capital tokenization, and more capital attracts more founders. In just the third quarter of 2024, Solana's native team raised $178 million.
The 'protocol' part of F.A.T. protocol engineering
Teams focused on core protocols (like Anza, Jump, Jito, etc.) are working every day to enhance performance and optimize the experience. They improve Solana's performance and capacity at the foundational layer by pushing the limits of hardware and software. Increasing bandwidth and reducing latency is a key strategy for Solana, emphasizing its ongoing commitment to building infrastructure for actual use rather than solely for valuation.
Finally, I call it engineering (rather than theory), because it elucidates an important value inherent in the ecosystem. A product culture that is opinionated yet pragmatic, continuously making tough trade-offs, launching and iterating in the real world to find product-market fit (PMF). This culture attracts practitioners rather than just academics.
As the ecosystem continues to grow, we should maintain this culture rather than become dogmatic, or worse— complacent due to any temporary success. The development of cryptocurrency is rapid, and we will always remain adaptable.
Currently, the foundation's marketing activities are expected to support these core pillars through various events and content— in the process, we celebrate the best founders, applications, and tokenized projects, while teams continue to strive to enhance Solana's speed and performance. Additionally, as it seems that innovation revival is unfolding in the United States, we will refocus on the U.S. market.
