In the 17th Year of the Crypto Era, Where is Solana's Path to Survival?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author | Wenser ( @wenser 2010 )

As the crypto industry enters its 17th year, the competition among public chains has gradually shifted from focusing on financing scale, TVL, developer numbers, and ecosystem projects to a multidimensional competition involving protocol revenue, protocol profit, ecosystem scale, and emerging assets.

After experiencing the DeFi Summer, GameFi Summer, NFT Summer, Inscription Summer, and Meme Summer, the competitive landscape of public chains in 2026 has gradually formed a pattern of "Ethereum mainnet ecosystem, BSC ecosystem, Ethereum L2 network ecosystems represented by Base and Robinhood Chain, Solana ecosystem, Hyperliquid EVM ecosystem, and other networks"—a structure of "four strong, one weak, plus others."

Data from DefiLlama shows that in the past 30 days, the top 10 public chains by revenue, excluding Canton due to incentivized revenue that lacks statistical reference value and Tron, which remains at the top due to stablecoin demand, are Robinhood Chain, Base, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, BSC, Hyperliquid L1, and Arbitrum, which basically aligns with our aforementioned classification. Among them, Solana, which once thrived on the Meme craze, has fallen to the 6th position in revenue ranking (5th after excluding Canton), with its revenue in the last 30 days being only about one-tenth of that of Robinhood Chain.

The point I want to make is this: Compared to Robinhood Chain, BSC, and Base ecosystems, which are thriving due to trading volume driven by Meme asset plays and backed by various exchanges or trading platforms as "final stations for listing coins," Solana needs to carve out a new development path to go further in the competition among public chains.

Currently, my reference suggestions are three points, bluntly put: raise dogs, gather allies, and strike opponents. In addition, similar proactive endorsements and support operations like those by Solana co-founder Toly with Green Dragon, and recently STONK and ZCAT, are also essential.

First move: Raising "dogs" under your command: Mobilizing the power of the people

Previously, Odaily Planet Daily reporter Golem briefly introduced Solana's current predicament in the development of Meme assets in the article "Solana is Urgent: Officially Supporting the Rapid Rise of the Billion-Dollar Golden Dog, Toly Also Wants to Court Robinhood." He also mentioned the relatively bright performance of the Meme asset issuance platform StonkFun and tokens like STONK and ZCAT within the Solana ecosystem.

Recently, we also detailed the custom trading pair feature jointly launched by Pump.fun and the Sunrise platform under Backpack, along with the xStocks platform for issuing Meme assets. Coupled with the news that LaunchLab under Solana's leading DEX platform Raydium now supports trading pairs for any tokens on Raydium, this is the first move that Solana's ecosystem should and has already taken—promoting the increase in both quantity and quality of its Meme asset issuance platforms.

Robinhood Chain has Pons and Long; BSC has Flap and Four.meme; Base has o1.Exchange and Bankr; and now, Solana finally has StonkFun and Pump.fun for issuing emerging asset categories. As the once "first chain for Meme coins," this level of activity and incentive is far from sufficient.

Of course, merely having Meme coins that devour liquidity and enrich a few is not enough. More importantly, Solana's officials should find ways to leverage their compliance advantages in the U.S. to promote the integration of more high-quality U.S. stock assets and include them in the stock tokenization liquidity pool, further expanding the range of asset pairings within the ecosystem.

What Robinhood Chain can do, Solana should and can do better.

Currently, since Hyperliquid has driven the on-chain Perp DEX boom, Solana's officials have made insufficient efforts in seeking innovation and change; after the emergence of Meme coin assets and liquidity pool pairing plays, Solana's official attitude has been far from proactive, and they have not initiated any ecological support incentive activities to encourage Solana ecosystem developers to attempt related trading platforms and innovative plays.

Thus, the "raising dogs" here is not derogatory; the "dogs" refer more to trading platforms, legitimate projects, and mature developers with technical development and ecosystem construction capabilities. The development of the ecosystem is particularly important for its builders.

Second move: Gathering allies: Acquisitions, investments, or profit-sharing collaborations

Recently, following the announcement of the parent company ICE Group of the New York Stock Exchange investing in OKX, the U.S. stock exchange Nasdaq has publicly announced a $100 million investment in Payward, the parent company of the crypto exchange Kraken, which has raised its valuation to $21 billion.

If numerous U.S. stock exchanges can spend lavishly to invest in crypto exchanges, why can't a public chain like Solana leverage similar investment, acquisition, or profit-sharing collaboration models to fill in its "last piece of trading territory"?

Previously, Polymarket invested $112 million to acquire the U.S. compliant exchange QCX to return to the U.S. market. Why can't Solana, as a U.S.-based company, emulate this move, gather its own allies, and create a "final liquidity station" for tokens within the Solana ecosystem?

Not to mention that Hyperliquid, in order to promote compliance in the U.S., has engaged in in-depth discussions with Kraken, which has stated it is working with the U.S. CFTC to provide registered U.S. users with certain crypto perpetual contract products related to the Hyperliquid market and its underlying Layer 1 blockchain through the CFTC-regulated platform Bitnomial.

At the very least, other crypto exchanges on the market are potential partners that Solana officials can approach. With the support of exchanges or trading platforms, Solana ecosystem tokens, whether legitimate DeFi projects, Meme coins, or Meme stock assets, will have their own "final listing destinations," just like BSC ecosystem tokens do for Binance, Base ecosystem tokens do for Coinbase, and Robinhood Chain tokens do for Robinhood.

With this move, Solana can avoid the "liquidity bottleneck" dilemma faced by other public chain ecosystems or exchanges and find its second growth curve, rather than clinging to the so-called "high-performance network, internet capital market, AI Agent payment network" concepts and stagnating.

Often, problems that money can solve are not problems at all.

Third move: Striking opponents: Uniting one faction, dividing another, and striking a third

Finally, from a purely commercial competition and industry competition perspective, let's briefly discuss without involving any value judgments or personal likes and dislikes.

If Solana were an internet company and the entire crypto market were the internet technology industry, then aside from its own development, reasonably and legally delaying the development pace of competitors and rivals is also a necessary part of "the marketplace is like a battlefield."

In this regard, I believe Solana can adopt two main strategies:

Firstly, from the perspective of dividing the competitor camp, Solana can completely form an offensive and defensive alliance with the relatively weaker Base & Coinbase, while maintaining direct competition with Robinhood Chain & Robinhood, BSC & Binance. This way, it can strengthen its internal development forces while following, imitating, or even pixel-level cloning the popular projects of its competitors, such as Launchpad platforms and Meme coins, which has been a common practice for the Base and BSC ecosystems.

Secondly, from the perspective of disrupting the strength of competitor builders, just as Pump.fun hires talent from the fomo platform with high salaries, Solana officials can also try to approach this aspect: on one hand, increase the economic returns for token developers and creators, similar to the creator tax of the Pump.fun platform, providing corresponding economic incentives; on the other hand, Solana officials can also initiate various lucrative trading competitions, encouraging Meme coin players, crypto traders, and crypto KOLs to build, trade, and innovate within the Solana ecosystem.

Whether through high salaries to attract talent, joint ventures and acquisitions, or leveraging investigations by regulatory agencies to influence competitors' development, both the Chinese and American internet industries operate this way, and the crypto market is merely a "smaller version of the internet finance industry."

Finally, Solana officials can also have some other clever ideas:

For instance, Solana co-founder Toly could take a page from Robinhood CEO Vlad and personally lobby executives of U.S. publicly listed companies, encouraging them to enter the Solana chain's stock token track as institutions or companies; Circle is a ready example in this regard.

For example, Solana officials could collaborate with the fomo platform to create a separate "Solana Meme Profit Ranking List" on that platform, specifically tracking the top 100 traders in terms of profitability of Meme coins within the Solana ecosystem.

For instance, Solana could even partner with well-known market-making institutions like Wintermute, GSR, and Galaxy to jointly support Meme coins from other ecosystems, with the recent Meme coin LAPTOP launched by Hunter Biden in the Base ecosystem serving as a reference example.

In summary, from the perspective of industry competition, all legal, compliant, and reasonable means are strategies that Solana officials can adopt. Of course, if Solana officials can incubate or cultivate more high-quality projects, create more innovative plays, and attract more liquidity and capital from traditional financial markets into the crypto market, that would be even better.

Although there may be many mistakes in the process, actively seeking change is always better than sitting idly by. In this regard, Solana officials are currently trapped in the shackles of technical upgrades and need to change their attitude of disengagement from community communication. Recently, Bonk Guy stated that due to the actions of Solana officials and within the ecosystem, he has "changed his prejudice against Solana and started to turn bullish," as a diamond hand and staunch supporter of Solana ecosystem Meme coins BONK and USELESS, there must also be a certain degree of "disappointment" involved.

I believe many people envision a crypto market that is fairer, more diverse, more innovative, and filled with wealth opportunities. For many developers and projects within the Solana ecosystem, revitalizing the Solana ecosystem is an obligation; for Solana, as a cornerstone of the crypto industry, building and developing the crypto market is equally an obligation.