Old ideas find new life on Solana
As Solana’s tech matures, some founders are starting new businesses based on old ideas that weren’t formerly feasible
Akif CUBUK/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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The Solana X mob was awakened after Avara CEO Stani Kulechov accused the Solana DeFi project Kamino of copying Aave’s tech — on top of having a “half-baked” UI, among other things.
Kulechov’s remarks set off a round of snipes on Crypto Twitter, but while his Kamino criticism may have been overplayed, his sentiment did touch on a real trend outside of the borrow-lend world. As Solana’s tech matures, some founders are starting new businesses based on old ideas that weren’t formerly feasible.
The chain’s fundamentals — sub-cent transaction fees, thousands of transactions per second, and a year of uninterrupted uptime — have created an environment where concepts that once struggled on other blockchains might now thrive.
“Revisiting things that didn’t work a few years ago is sometimes more valuable than imagining new ones,” Inversion Capital founder Santiago Santos wrote on X this week.
On a forthcoming episode of the Lightspeed podcast, I asked Santos to name some ideas that deserve a second crack. His answer: crypto gaming and options protocols. Perpetual futures are obviously a successful business, he added, but onchain DeFi options less so.
Another old idea that may be breaking through is social trading, which has been a recurring theme in crypto for years — especially in the form of copy trading. Tensor’s social memecoin trading app Vector is already lapping the annualized revenue from its Solana NFT marketplace.
A couple weeks ago, Tensor’s co-founder told me Vector would succeed where other apps haven’t because of its sleek Robinhood-esque packaging and the inherently social nature of memecoins — for which Solana seems to have an insatiable appetite.
On the institutional side of things, look at Sol Strategies: Tasked with turning around a flagging crypto holding company, new CEO Leah Wald took an eerily similar approach to the one pioneered for bitcoin by Michael Saylor with Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). I’ve already predicted a few other MicroStrategy for Solana equivalents will come to market this year.
Tech history shows that the winners aren’t necessarily the first movers but the best executors. Solana developers believe they’ve built the infrastructure for those second chances to succeed.
“The iPhone would be a perfect example as there were other attempts at smartphones before, but Apple came at the right time, right place,” Titan Exchange CEO Chris Chung said. “Hopefully Solana can provide the groundwork for some revolutionary ideas to take place as well.”
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