Original title: Solana Fndn 2025 Marketing Memo Original author: akshaybd Original translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor’s note: The current cycle's hot performance of Solana, the intense trading of meme tokens on-chain, and the continuous rise in token prices, can be attributed to the Solana Foundation’s focus on enhancing infrastructure performance and reducing latency to meet market demand, promoting the growth of founders, applications, and tokenization projects.
The following is the original content (for ease of reading, 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. Today, you only need to download a wallet or app, click a few buttons, and you can join the internet capital market—a globally accessible ledger that can tokenize entities, currencies, and cultures.
Why is this important?
It helps us create a world where anyone can have assets anytime, 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 foundational ownership'. The competition for high-performance L1 is not just about establishing a decentralized Nasdaq, but about building 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 low settlement efficiency. The cryptocurrency market, however, is more accessible and liquid. At peak times, its trading volume even exceeds that of NASDAQ and NYSE; we have the opportunity to build the best capital market on the internet.
In the future, companies will list directly 'on the internet' and will be able to reach over a billion investors holding private keys—voting with their funds to determine 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 the significance of F.A.T. protocol engineering; the industry was largely built on the notion that 'value would primarily be concentrated 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 evidenced at the Breakpoint conference in 2024. By focusing on founders, applications, and tokenization, Solana's market share in transaction fees—an excellent indicator of ecosystem activity and overall health—grew by 1,489% in 2024, reaching 12%.
F = Founders, not just developers
Now, for a determined group of founders, it has never been simpler and faster to go from garage startups to billion-dollar companies with just an internet connection.
1. tensor: Two founders from Canada, company valuation of $445 million
2. pump.fun: A UK team that achieved $155 million in fee revenue within 8 months
3. birdeye: Based in Vietnam, user count reached 24 million in 2024
The startup flywheel will continue to operate at high speed in 2025, with the colosseum hackathon (Solana's hackathon) being the largest talent discovery and growth program in the crypto space, with past participants cumulatively raising $650 million.
This flywheel benefits from ecosystem support built for scalability: from the superteam hub, shipyard workspace, to the solanaturbine accelerator, community-driven infrastructure further accelerates the growth of founders.
A = Applications, not just infrastructure
Infrastructure represents uncertain optimism, while applications represent certain optimism. The Solana ecosystem prioritizes truly needed products for users; what are the results?
Just in October of this year, application revenue reached $73 million, a 185-fold increase year-over-year, now leading all networks. Additionally, 74% of funds within the ecosystem flowed to applications (compared to 40% for Ethereum), as founders followed user demand.
Solana has always upheld the idea that what matters is not TVL, but the gathering of economic activity. Chain GDP (revenue generated by applications) is the primary metric for measuring the long-term success of a protocol. When revenue generated by applications exceeds that of the foundational layer, it indicates that the protocol layer has achieved product-market fit. If your infrastructure layer is exploitative, applications will leave to establish their own chains or migrate to other chains.
Research the Laffer Curve.
T = Tokenization, not just TVL
TVL is a passive, self-referential metric. Active metrics like capital efficiency and trading volume are more instructive. The more important ultimate goal is: Solana is the best platform for the issuance of internet assets. In the past six months, we have witnessed the launch of 2.6 million tokens, accounting for 78% of the total across all chains. While Memes may occupy a larger share of public consciousness, they are not the only things that are growing.
The treasury balance has doubled to $134 million, stablecoins have grown by 120% to approximately $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 regulations, hyper-tokenization will accelerate—this will become a globally accessible ledger, where all assets will be tokenized.
Each component of F.A.T. reinforces the others: more founders launching products, more products attracting users, more users driving the tokenization of more capital, and more capital attracting more founders. Just in the third quarter of 2024, the Solana 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 improve performance and optimize experiences. They enhance Solana's performance and capacity at the foundational layer by pushing the limits of hardware and software. Increasing bandwidth and reducing latency are key strategies for Solana, highlighting its ongoing commitment to building infrastructure for actual use, rather than purely for valuation.
Finally, I call it engineering (rather than theory) because it elucidates an important value inherent in the ecosystem. A strong-willed yet pragmatic product culture that continuously makes tough trade-offs, launching and iterating in the real world to find product-market fit (PMF). This culture attracts practitioners, not 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, marketing efforts from the foundation are expected to support these core pillars through various events and content—during this process, we celebrate the best founders, applications, and tokenized projects, while teams continue to work hard to enhance Solana's speed and performance. Furthermore, given that an innovation revival seems to be unfolding in the United States, we will refocus on the U.S. market.
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