Bernstein Highlights Solana's Lead in Blockchain Payments Amid Ongoing Scalability and Outage Concerns

Solana’s impressive growth in the current market cycle has been met with bottleneck issues and network outages.
The development team believes much of the challenges stem from spam bots using the network, something they are aiming to overcome.
Several major players, such as Bernstein and Fantom CEO Andre Cronje, remain positive on Solana’s long-term outlook despite the issues.

Solana has had a pretty outrageous past 12 months. The coin has rebounded from a near-death experience to sit at well over AUD $200, posting impressive gains of 750%. The renewed attention has been driven heavily by the performance of Solana-based meme coins – in particular, Dogwifhat and Bonk. However, despite people clamouring to pronounce Solana’s network as the heir to Ethereum’s DeFi throne, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

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Growing Pains for Solana as Fantom’s CEO Backs The Blockchain’s Ability to Perform

The past week has seen Solana’s scalability called into question as the network struggles to handle the increased capacity. Network outages have plagued the blockchain in recent times, with transaction failures becoming commonplace alongside delays in Solana’s typically lightning-fast settlement times. The Solana dev team has placed the blame on spam bots infiltrating the network, which is something that they are working on to overcome. Despite these challenges, several industry players have rushed to support Solana.

Analytics company Bernstein stated that Solana is on its way to becoming the top player in market activity thanks to impressive stablecoin metrics. The company suggests that Solana’s effectiveness as a pure L1 chain – as opposed to Ethereum becoming more efficient when on-ramping with L2s – is a big reason for its success.

The big change this cycle has been the dominant market share of Solana in value of stablecoins transferred vs. prior cycle market leader Ethereum.

Bernstein analysts

Meanwhile, founder and CEO of Fantom, Andre Cronje, also backed the blockchain to overcome its current issues.

Seeing a lot of “I told you so’s” against Solana, because *checks notes* Solana currently has so much demand for blockspace that they need to optimize some bottlenecks (which also btw, is just an engineering hurdle and not a fault of consensus or any critical component).
Victim…
— Andre Cronje (@AndreCronjeTech) April 6, 2024