Bankless Joint Creation What I learned about Solana on Solana BreakPoint

Unlocking the Power of Solana My Experience at the Solana BreakPoint and Bankless Joint Creation

Author: David Hoffman, Co-founder of Bankless; Translator: LianGuaixiaozou

I just finished my last conference event of the year, where I had the opportunity to meet many cool people and hear about amazing innovative ideas in the crypto space. I love attending conferences in interesting places around the world, but the final conference of 2024 was a bit different from the typical crypto conferences I usually attend!

This was my first non-Ethereum conference.

But it wasn’t a comprehensive conference like Permissionless. I attended the Solana Breakpoint conference organized by the Solana Foundation.

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It’s hard to make a rational judgment right now. As someone deeply connected to the Ethereum community, my only perspective on Solana has been formed through Twitter, which is a terrible lens to judge anything, especially things in the crypto space. Crypto Twitter is a constant battleground where different camps fight to shape favorable opinions.

So, I decided to look at Solana from the outside.

If Crypto Twitter doesn’t show the true face of Solana, what other way is there to gather information apart from attending Breakpoint in person and getting firsthand information?

In this article, I will show you everything I learned at Solana Breakpoint.

1. Introduction to the Solana Community

My main task for this conference was to understand the composition of the Solana community. Who does this ecosystem attract and why?

Solana attracts a group of engineers that Ethereum doesn’t have. They are engineers from Apple, Tesla, SLianGuaiceX, and other companies, familiar with the relationship between hardware and software, and they are strong technical optimization factors. Solana provides them with a meaningful way of working that Ethereum cannot offer.

In fact, for these engineers, some of Ethereum’s priorities may seem meaningless and a waste of time. This is probably why Chris Burniske differentiates the Ethereum community into “optimists” and “ideology-driven” categories, while the Solana community falls under the category of “pragmatists”.

For me, the “pragmatists” in the crypto world find a comfortable “home” between hardware and software in the crypto network, while the ideology-driven category is more focused on the open-source software domain, where values, governance, and identity can be encoded.

For those who view the crypto world through the lens of Crypto Twitter, they might think, “Oh, David is going behind enemy lines!”

In reality, the Solana community is just another crypto community. People here don’t think in terms of opposing factions. Hackers attend Ethereum and Solana hackathons, as well as StarkNet, Near, and Chainlink hackathons. Some builders choose to stay because they found a problem they want to work hard to solve.

I met the Marinade (an automated staking platform on Solana) team, as well as Anoushk and Harsh, the duo developers of Solana’s lightweight client Tinydancer. Both teams expressed their gratitude for the content produced by Bankless over the years, with the Tinydancer duo stating that it was Bankless that initially got them into the crypto world.

These interactive sessions at crypto conferences are always satisfying – and they provide endless inspiration! Every time I come back from these events, I immediately catch up with Ryan on all the interactions because I love sharing the abundance of positive sentiment and good vibes towards cryptocurrencies in the real world.

All this talk is to emphasize that the Solana community in the real world is not much different from the Ethereum community in the real world, but rather, extreme internet leaders in these two communities define the native web identities of these ecosystems.

2. What’s the atmosphere like?

This is the third-ever Solana Breakpoint conference, with the first one happening during the absolute bubble of the 2021 market, when the SOL exchange rate reached a peak of over $250, and the second one took place just a week before the FTX crash.

It can be said for certain that Solana Breakpoint has never been held under stable market conditions until now. In my opinion, this is the first time Solana is able to get real signals from the community attracted to Breakpoint because in the previous years, Solana only managed to attract a large number of short-term visitors (and scammers) during bull markets. I did not participate in the first two Breakpoint conferences. The following content is what I learned from talking to people who attended the previous two conferences.

Congratulations to Solana Breakpoint for being the only conference that caused a sensation instead of a tumultuous uproar.

— David Hoffman, November 1, 2023

The atmosphere of Solana Breakpoint reminds me of the early days of Ethereum for me, but there are also some unique aspects to it.

Firstly, there is a very evident feeling that the Solana community is sitting on gold. They know they have something that the whole world will want in the future, and that “pre-rich belief” is definitely present. I wouldn’t say this atmosphere is everywhere… it’s definitely limited to a few. Other attendees may not be as concerned about this aspect, but it certainly exists. This atmosphere naturally brings about a newfound optimism and excitement, reminding me of the freshness I felt in the early days of Ethereum, especially at the ETH Denver conference in 2018 and 2019.

3. Solana and Ethereum

The content at the main venue is all about scalability. The most expressive part of the Solana Breakpoint event that captures the atmosphere is probably the 90-minute opening keynote speeches by various Solana leaders (the conference was held on Halloween, and Anatoly was dressed as a green dragon).

It’s fascinating to hear direct criticisms of Ethereum in these keynote speeches. From this perspective, jokes about “not needing any layers” and “aligning with Ethereum” are actually at the core of Solana’s DNA. Crypto Twitter has clearly assimilated into the Solana culture, and this is the part that I find least resonating.

Solana’s identity is largely formed by the need to survive after the collapse of FTX, while the Ethereum community criticizes the rampant value extraction culture and the inconsistency of the so-called monolithic expansion strategy in the Solana application layer. At the most frustrating time for Solana, the Ethereum community was not friendly.

It was at this moment that the Solana community gritted its teeth, persisted, and climbed out of the bad narrative environment. The comments about Solana were very bad and buzzing.

Venture capitalists no longer invest in Solana projects simply because they are built on Solana. The market value of SOL is $4 billion, less than half of the bottom market value of ETH in 2018-2019. During this period, Ethereum also faced widespread concerns about its own financing ability.

I am very sure that it was at this time that the leadership of Solana took direct, hands-on action to correct its narrative before the self-fulfilling prophecy around Solana became established. This was when the Mert reply army started to play a role, and you would find Anatoly replying to every tweet about Solana, whether it was good or bad. It was at that time that Solana began to develop its narrative and memes, revitalizing the community.

It is worth praising that they have been hugely successful. The narrative around Solana has acquired new meaning and new heights, with almost crazy levels of engagement on Twitter. The Ethereum community mistakenly tried to “finish” Solana by associating it with FTX as much as possible, but it played a big role in creating the negative environment in which Solana had to rebuild.

Now, Solana has emerged from the bear market unscathed. The entire Solana project now knows that Ethereum is not its friend, so we saw criticisms of Ethereum at the main venue of the Solana annual summit.

Maybe I focus on this too much! But the collective spirit of the crypto community is one of the things that attracts me the most in this industry. Although I often find myself participating in the battle between chains like others, this collective spirit always reminds us how we can make things better, even if our L1s are fundamentally in direct competition with each other.

4. What excites the Solana community?

Rebirth and early entry are exciting, but on a technical level, almost all attendees of Breakpoint are most interested in Firedancer.

Firedancer is a new Solana client built by the Jump Crypto team. The original Solana client was built by the Solana Foundation, burdened with heavy technical issues and without optimization. The Firedancer client promises to greatly improve the performance of the Solana network.

The Firedancer client can be seen as a major network upgrade for Solana, and if you like, you can think of it as Solana 2.0. This excitement is similar to Ethereum’s EIP-1559 or the Merge, except that it focuses on performance.

At the Breakpoint conference, they announced the Firedancer testnet, which got the whole community excited. Exploring what all this means for Solana and validator economics is a bit beyond my knowledge scope, maybe we’ll discuss it in a future Bankless article.

Firedancer also unlocked a key feature for Solana, it is developing into a multi-client network. A single-client network is fragile and prone to downtime. With Firedancer, Solana now has a second client, significantly improving its reliability.

Of course, having a network that consists partly of Firedancer and partly of old Solana clients from the foundation is not feasible because the entire network would be constrained by the bottleneck of the old clients. But in my conversation with Austin, he said the suggested architecture is for Firedancer client operators to use the old Solana client as a backup client, with Firedancer as the primary client. Apparently, this way would be a win-win solution.

Another thing that caught my attention is Solana’s Token22 package. Token22 is a token software enhancement package that brings a host of additional features to Solana tokens, including custom permissions and confidential transactions, meaning privacy.

5. So, do I like Solana?

Solana has recently attracted more of my attention. What’s the deal? Has Bankless finally become bullish on Solana? Or is David’s attention really just being lured into the Solana community – let’s attack him in the Twitter narrative war? Or is it something else?

To be honest, I don’t have the answer either. Chris Burniske recently tried to force me into either being bullish or bearish on Twitter, and it’s been frustrating.

How I engage with the Solana community, I will let the future decide. I do know that I have a deep resonance with the Ethereum community, and the ethos of the Ethereum community still doesn’t quite make sense in the Solana community.

In a panel discussion about Solana validator economics, the room was packed, but for the next discussion about the future of Solana community governance, almost everyone disappeared. It’s really discouraging to see such a scene.

David Hoffman was one of the few spectators. It’s really ironic.

— ZenLlama, November 5, 2023

Putting on my Solana bear market hat, this is a clear result of compromising on decentralization by relying on decentralized features and hoping to gradually achieve a decentralized network over time. This has attracted some communities that do not prioritize decentralization as much as other industries, and the importance of community ownership and decentralization is reflected in the community’s focus.

Or maybe the conversation has just begun, and I am bearish on this part of Solana – time will tell!

That’s everything I learned at the Solana Breakpoint conference!

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