The next is a visitor submit and opinion from Hart Lambur, Co-Founding father of RIsk Labs (UMA and Throughout).
Solana’s current development didn’t come at Ethereum’s expense. It expanded the full crypto consumer base. As an alternative of pulling customers away from Ethereum, Solana served as a gateway for brand new entrants into web3. With quick transactions and low charges, and a vibrant app layer, it grew to become the best onboarding ramp for the newest wave of memecoin merchants.
Prefer it or not, memecoins like HarryPotterObamaSonicInu and Fartcoin weren’t simply noise; they launched tens of millions of individuals to crypto, many for the primary time. Solana wasn’t simply the place they made their first commerce – it was their first actual interplay with the web3 ecosystem. And whereas many misplaced cash, a few of these customers caught round.
The query now’s: how will we guarantee they keep, and expertise extra of what web3 affords past hypothesis? As Vitalik put it final 12 months about memecoins, there’s an “alternative right here to attempt to create one thing extra positive-sum and long-lasting.”
From Spectators to Residents
This inflow of recent customers presents a uncommon alternative for crypto. At its peak, Solana’s memecoin growth helped drive a $47.9 billion market cap. Sure, memecoins are down 76% since their December 2024 all-time excessive, however Solana didn’t simply gasoline hypothesis; it onboarded actual customers and actual capital. Whereas the memecoin craze could also be short-lived, the members it attracted don’t should be.
Crypto has lengthy promised mass adoption, and now, we have now the possibility to ship on that promise. However this development comes with its personal set of challenges. If we don’t make it simple for brand new customers to navigate the broader ecosystem – limiting their expertise to only one blockchain or a single use case – we danger dropping the momentum, capital, and development that include it.
The Shift from Onboarding to Retention
Attracting customers is not the primary problem. Memecoins on Solana opened that door for a brand new era, similar to ICOs, DeFi Summer time, and NFTs earlier than. The actual check is guaranteeing the broader web3 ecosystem is as seamless and intuitive as essentially the most user-friendly blockchains and use instances. Solana nonetheless feels separate from the broader Ethereum ecosystem, very like the assorted Ethereum L2s used to really feel. If we fail to make it simple for customers to discover totally different ecosystems after the thrill round traits like memecoins fades, we’ll lose them simply as rapidly as they arrived.
Up to now, shifting from one chain to a different (whether or not to Ethereum, Base, or one other L2) felt sophisticated and expensive. It’s very like arriving in an thrilling new metropolis, wanting to discover, solely to understand that the most effective locations are laborious to achieve on account of outdated transit programs. That is how crypto feels for a lot of customers at the moment: filled with potential, but slowed down by friction at each step. This friction isn’t inevitable and we now have the instruments to take away it.
Crosschain Infrastructure Presents the Answer
Crosschain infrastructure can present the answer. Business-wide requirements like ERC-7683 enable web3 apps to deal with advanced multi-step crosschain transactions as a single consumer request. Authored by Throughout and Uniswap, the usual permits builders to cover the complexity of interacting with a number of chains whereas nonetheless leveraging their mixed energy. Customers profit from the most effective of each worlds: the simplicity of 1 chain with the scalability of many.
The Future is Unified
Solana’s current consumer development illustrates how UX optimization can drive onboarding at scale. However onboarding is only one facet of the equation – retention is the actual check. For web3 to really develop, it must really feel like one seamless ecosystem, not a group of fragmented networks. In the identical approach ERC-7683 and intents have unified Ethereum L2s, we should give customers the identical seamless interactions with Solana.
Ethereum, Solana, and each different chain aren’t in a zero-sum battle. The long run isn’t about which chain wins. It’s about making web3 work as a unified, intuitive expertise. This implies constructing infrastructure that connects customers throughout chains quick, simplifying complexity, and making your complete ecosystem really feel cohesive. Web3 will solely scale when customers cease fascinated about chains fully, similar to nobody thinks about TCP/IP when searching the web. That’s the longer term we’re constructing towards.
