Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko stated at the Emergence conference in Prague on December 6 that meme coins brought many technical challenges to Solana, but these challenges became opportunities for innovation.
Meme coins bring pressure tests that strengthen Solana.
Yakovenko stated that the explosive popularity of meme coins put Solana under pressure from massive transaction volumes, but this pressure test also gave the team the opportunity to address many unexpected issues. He cited that to solve the problem of high transaction loads, Solana developed "Localized fee markets," which not only improved efficiency but also allowed Solana to be more flexible in facing future challenges.
Technical optimization allows Solana to overcome the frequent outage problems of previous years.
Solana faced a lot of criticism in 2022 due to multiple outages; however, Yakovenko emphasized that Solana's technical team has become increasingly strong and is able to respond to issues quickly. He mentioned that Solana experienced only one outage in February 2024, which came not long after the meme coin platform Pump.fun was launched in January 2024. Therefore, this outage is thought to be related to the network load pressure brought by Pump.fun.
"Fortunately, our team resolved the issue quickly," Yakovenko said with a smile. He added that the scalability of multi-core systems presents many challenges, such as insufficient memory bandwidth speed potentially affecting transaction throughput, and such issues are often unpredictable even in research.
Solana's single-state design makes it easy for developers to choose.
Yakovenko mentioned that Solana's design allows developers not to create additional bridges or procedures for each meme coin. "Raydium (decentralized exchange) did not expect that every meme coin would use their liquidity pool, and meme coin projects naturally utilized their features without additional setup, making the whole process simple." Yakovenko believes that this convenience and low transaction fees have allowed the Solana ecosystem to thrive.
Compared to other layered scaling solutions (like Layer 2), Yakovenko questioned whether other developers could easily replicate Solana's success. He said, "In theory, it's possible because developers tend to be lazier, and Solana is the easiest shortcut."
The explosive popularity of meme coins is not surprising; entertainment is the biggest source of profit.
Yakovenko was initially surprised by the popularity of meme coins, but later found it quite reasonable. "In almost every digital economy, entertainment is the largest source of revenue. When you think about it, um~ it actually makes a lot of sense," Yakovenko said.
This article 'Solana Founder: The Meme Coin Craze and Pump.fun Strengthen Solana, Entertainment is the Biggest Source of Wealth' first appeared in Chain News ABMedia.
