Solana pays out $2 billion a year in tokens, but only makes about $21 million a year in actual chain revenue. This is a completely unsustainable business system, an absolute house of cards, and I'm going to give you the deepest dive into all the critical flaws you need to be aware of if you are holding Solana. I've held Solana before. This is not financial advice. I bought Solana under $10, made my money on it, and sold it. This information that I found is part of the reason why I am not in Solana anymore. This is the most important information every holder needs to see, and I'm presenting it based on deep research and answering questions. My goal is to help you have the best information you can possibly get as a crypto investor, because I want you to be successful investing.
This is what none of the Solana hypers cover. Nobody putting 100X on their thumbnails is looking at this huge problem. But serious investors do look at these things. So this is a slide deck for serious investors. I'm giving you the full bear case, and once you see this, there's like no hype case left. And there's an even worse future that nobody in Solana even sees coming yet. So let's look at all the huge problems that are plaguing Solana.
Now, I'm not saying that Solana is dead. I understand the pitch. I understand the hype. I've actually pitched Solana and encouraged people, by my example years ago, to buy it myself. So I know all the hype and all the speculation and everything people are excited about, but that is not based in the reality of what's actually happening. Obviously, Solana has users. Obviously, there's volume. Obviously, there's people building. We're going to look at it. Bottom line on the discussion: if a business sold dollar bills for $0.90, there'd be explosive growth, but would it be sustainable? That's my analogy for Solana. They're selling dollar bills for $0.90 and then talking about how amazing it is.
So we're going to cover all these huge issues here: the upside-down revenue model that is totally unsustainable, and the validators have no intention of changing it. The value capture. I'm going to cover deep technical things that most people avoid and think aren't important, but these are critically important if you're investing in it to at least know about. We're going to cover the centralization, governance held hostage, all the outage history, the MEV and sandwich attacks, FTX, the meme coin casino, the hacks, the regulatory whiplash, and I'm going to wreck the bull hype. When you see what I'm sharing here, the bull hype will look so superficial it's ridiculous. And then the one thing that almost nobody sees coming: the future is ICP, and it's going to annihilate almost everything else in crypto. It's going to run over everything like a train while all these other cryptos are competing to do something that, once you see under the surface, doesn't look that good. But even without ICP, Solana's entire revenue model is upside down. And obviously I hold ICP based on the technology.
The Brutal Math: 99% Short of a Real Business Model
The first main problem I've put out very clearly with my title is that Solana is 99% short of where it should be if it had a real business model. And billionaires, according to the conversations I'm having with people who book calls, which you can do through skool.com/jerrybanfield, the people who have lots of money to invest care about your business model. They don't care about your hype and your narratives and your marketing. For the most part, the people with money to invest care about a rock-solid business model. Can this make money? Solana earns tens of millions of dollars and pays out billions of dollars to try and incentivize that.
Here's the data for the fees, the brutal math that the Solana hypers ignore. Right now, the total chain fees are about $587,000 a day, but the revenue is only $57,000 a day. The whole chain in actual income only makes about $21 million a year. And meanwhile, it issues $2 billion. That's approximately 100 times as many tokens as it makes back where it actually earns. So this snapshot has a few hundred thousand in fees. The people that are hyping Solana up point to this as how strong it's doing. But only about $57,000 in real chain revenue a day, and inflation runs at 3.8%.
People consistently criticize ICP for printing all these tokens. Solana's inflation is nearly double what ICP is, but the market cap is nearly 40 times what ICP is. So that's effectively 80 times worse. But it gets even further. On a $51 billion valuation, you get $2 billion a year in new token issuance, which is a huge problem. A network that's making $21 million in revenue while issuing $2 billion, this is not a self-funding economy. This is a dilution-subsidized security model. And almost no serious investor who is going to want to put real money into something is going to get past this brutal math right here, which is why I'm communicating it up front. Almost no one that actually holds a Solana token has ever considered this extremely important information. All of the people buying it are assuming there's going to be a bright future. And I'm going to very clearly communicate that, to me, the most probable futures for Solana are very dark and things are not going well.
Underpriced Block Space and No Security Budget
The Solana hypers will argue that the low fees are the feature, but they're not, because ICP has lower fees and can do much more. I mean so much more, it's not even a valid comparison. On Solana, the way the fee structure works, this is actually a problem, because the product with the fees that you're paying for is block space, but the block space is deliberately underpriced and there's no long-term security budget coming from usage. So the inflation is supposed to be tapering down towards a 1.5% terminal rate, and as the subsidy declines, real fees are supposed to replace it. But the chain revenue is not setting up any of that.
By comparison, Ethereum's problem is expensive block space. Solana's problem is underpriced block space. But it's not underpriced enough, because you still have to pay gas fees to work. Solana is underpaying for the security. When the inflation tapers away, who pays to keep this all working? I'd like to see a number, not just some narrative. Right now, yes, it is cheap for users transacting, but it is brutal for validators. And this undermines the entire security of the network and brings any decentralization claims into question, showing that they're very questionable.
Solana is absolutely a house of cards. Right now, the Solana hardware official requirements are high-count CPUs, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and multiple enterprise NVMe drives. This is not something you can just run from home. Even though the blockchain itself can't practically host phone photos, the equipment to run it is expensive. Right now the validators are paying for all these vote transactions. So validators have to shell out hundreds of Solana a year to pay to vote on the blocks. That means the validators have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to vote on their own blocks. And then, putting in the operating costs on top of that, all the hardware, putting that in a data center, having the bandwidth available, you can't even get into Solana mining realistically unless you have millions of dollars that you can invest.
Solana wants fees low enough that users can spam the chain, but validators are running these expensive machines. Right now, inflation is filling the gap. And it is absolutely unsustainable without inflation, which means you have billions of dollars every year that are getting created. You're getting dumped on for holding the token because the business system itself does not support a real economy. Are you seeing a huge problem with that? It is absolutely unsustainable. It is only sustainable on ignorance and flywheel marketing and developers not being aware that there is a vastly better solution than participating in this. The question: would you run a business where a customer pays a fraction of a cent and your server bill's $90,000 a year? Well, the Solana holders are paying for that difference right now. Someone said Solana's cannibalizing itself. It is. And if you're a Solana holder, you are paying to support this unsustainable business system that clearly doesn't work despite massive amounts of marketing and hype.
Where's the Value Accumulation? Apps Get Rich, Solana Gets Scraps
Now, here's another point. You almost never see anyone get into this critical problem, but this is something an investor with real money would want to know about: where's the value accumulation? The summary is apps get rich, Solana gets scraps. Utterly unsustainable. Here's an example: one app out-earns the entire chain. Right now, if you look at it, Hyperliquid in one quarter made $156 million. All of Solana in the same quarter made $89 million. But there's hardly any of that revenue, hardly any of the applications on Solana, quote, "on Solana," actually giving much value back to the chain directly. Do you see how that's a problem? How the infrastructure itself is not participating in most of the value accumulation? And therefore the token holders, even if there are all these transactions, are not really getting to participate in the benefits of holding the token.
So if you look at the snapshot revenue, all these casinos, DEXs, meme coin launchers, they're monetizing their activity. They're printing themselves money. But very little of that is actually coming back to real value for the token. And AI completely agrees with this. If you use ChatGPT and you research Solana and you ask these questions, the AI will fully support all of this information. You will find some videos where other people brought some of these up, but nobody has ever done this deep of a dive into the absolute critical problems that are all putting together on Solana. So my intention is that this is the absolute best, deepest, serious-problem video out here on Solana.
Solana is amazing for app creators now, because for some creators you can get incentivizers and liquidity. It's not going to stay that way forever when the whole business system is a house of cards waiting to come down and one single weak point could bring everything down. The big question, though, is: if apps capture the revenue and the chain gets scraps, why is holding Solana the way to even invest in Solana's growth at all? It doesn't make sense when all you're getting on Solana is a bunch of token inflation, and then the rest of these other business systems are taking most of the profits for themselves. One important person in the community moved most of his crypto to ICP. To me, that's where the value accumulation is going to be, because none of these other chains can act. They all have this same basic problem, but Solana has it worse than most. Now, problem number four: almost all the hype channels, all they do is point to the metrics, the metrics. But the metrics are hollow. The metrics crumble quickly under scrutiny.
Vote Spam, Bot Spam, Failed Spam
I'll leave you wondering how many humans are making real transactions at all on Solana. Problem number four: vote spam, bot spam, failed spam. Solana's headline transactions per second includes validator vote transactions where validators, as I said before, have to pay to vote on their own transactions. Even Solana-friendly dashboards separate these transactions. So there's a huge amount of transactions that are just votes on blocks that artificially inflate the transaction count. But then there's all kinds of failed transactions. Depending on exactly the environment right now, this can change, but data has shown that at certain times the majority of transactions actually fail. And you have all these high-activity bot addresses that are putting out all kinds of transactions.
On top of that, there's huge incentives to get fake users, because most hypers will go off of users and wallet addresses and shallow metrics. When you have, quote, "decentralized teams" that don't even have people in their faces, there's every incentive in the world to cheat your metrics every single way you can so that you can give some influencer very clear data points. So what it looks like to me is there's a vast amount of cheating across all these apps using all kinds of bots to fake all kinds of data and users to try and get people to invest in their tokens. But underneath all that, there tends to be very little real human activity. I would estimate, based on what I've seen, at least 90% or more of transactions on Solana are bot transactions or inauthentic transactions. It's not a real human taking real action.
Plus, on top of that, there's paid market-making services and Telegram bots that inflate token volume and hold their accounts to push junk tokens up on DexScreener. When you launch some meme coin, it would make sense so you can point at the holders on it: here, let's use this paid marketing service where you pay someone to distribute a whole bunch of your coins to all these wallets to make it look like your meme coin is super popular. Then those are all Solana transactions, which again, are not actually properly funding and accruing value to the blockchain. So when all these hypers look at Solana's numbers, how much of that is failed transactions, validator voting, bots, wash trading, meme coin churns, and what percentage of what's left is a real human being doing something real? Extreme problem.
But this continues. There's like 14 problems on here. This is so bad. When you put all this stuff together, to me it's unfathomable to hold the Solana token and to expect anything like even a decent return going forward, let alone what some of these hypers are saying, which I'll talk about at the end. I'll talk about how ridiculous their numbers are, and how they don't even believe in it at all themselves.
Decentralization Is a Marketing Story
Problem number five with Solana: decentralization is a marketing story. The reality, as I showed with the validators before, and the vote cost and the foundation stake, to me, I don't see true, meaningful decentralization at all on Solana. But even worse, the actual infrastructure is basically Amazon Web Services or other hosting with tokens. All the websites and stuff, like Pump.fun and all these websites, they're not hosted on Solana. Solana itself as a blockchain can barely do anything. You have to build all the rest of the infrastructure on third-party stuff, and then it's basically Amazon Web Services with tokens. That's why it's so hard to get real value and real business revenue into the chain itself, because almost all the stuff is not even built on the chain itself. It connects with the chain and does transactions, but everything else, like serving the website, is all off-chain.
But even if you just look at the chain itself, the validators peaked in 2023 at 2,500, and now they're under 800 validators today. That's two-thirds of the validators lost on Solana in the last three years. And I would project that this is going to keep going down. Depending on how you define the Nakamoto coefficient, it's pretty low. And there are literally two providers that are holding 43% of the entire stake on Solana, which to me removes any real thoughts about decentralization in Solana. When you go down to see what Edward Snowden said, he called out Solana at Token 2049 for taking good ideas and centralizing everything to make it faster and cheaper, saying the network is currently used for meme coins and scams. To me, that is the very clear reality. And Edward Snowden, with his experience, is in a very good place to be able to give you an accurate representation of what's going on here.
The thing to think about: real resilience means individuals verifying networks from their basements, or being able to participate in voting directly on ICP, having transparency as to how the network operates. I don't see why people, except out of ignorance, are celebrating a system like Solana that creates the exact banking monopolies that crypto set out to destroy. Everyone hyping Solana is essentially hyping the same kind of infrastructure we already have in the existing banking system. It defeats the point of crypto.
Governance Held Hostage
Problem six: governance held hostage. The people who must approve the fix to drop this billions of dollars of inflation that's being dumped into Solana every year, do you think the validators are going to cut their own paycheck when they're already not even getting enough to make sense? Clearly, even with what the validators are getting at higher prices, they are still not continuing to run their validators despite all this. In SIMD 228 in 2025, Solana tried to pass a governance proposal to fix all this inflation, but it failed to reach a supermajority. Why? Because validators make money out of inflation. Asking validators to pass a tokenomic reform is like asking them to cut their own paychecks.
By comparison, on ICP, DFINITY stayed out of the voting and let the community vote, and the community voted in favor of cutting inflation by 70%. The exact same change that the Solana validators refused to make, ICP made. Thus, you can see on Solana, they want to continue printing billions of dollars a year, and the whole system will collapse when the price goes below a certain point, because that hardware, the data centers, are expensive. And then you have to pay to keep voting. Even if the price appreciates, the cost of a vote continues to grow. But the lower it goes, the less incentive there is to run a validator, then you start losing money. If the price goes down, even when it's been up, you still have fewer validators. Is there even a fix for this possible? Right now, you're just looking at billions and billions more dollars from Solana and nothing likely to be changed.
Network Halts and MEV in the Dark
Here's another problem with Solana. You have at least seven full network halts. Yes, we can go back to December 2020 and September 2021, but even back to February 2023, there were five hours of downtime, then 19 hours. And in 2022, there were four major events. As AI continues to advance and find more vulnerabilities, how many more outages are we looking at on Solana? Especially if you combine a few issues together. Based on what we've already seen, the network has had some serious issues, and going down completely like that is not sustainable to run global financial infrastructure. Now, uptime has been 100% in recent months. That is an improvement. However, global financial infrastructure should not have this kind of history of full network halts based on fairly minor things and client bugs like that. The tech stack does not look that strong. ICP has had zero of these things in the same amount of time. ICP is a bit newer than Solana, like a year newer, and it is at zero of these things in the same amount of time. That's an example of the infrastructure superiority.
Problem number eight: MEV moved into the dark. No public mempool did not mean no MEV. Sandwich attacks every four seconds. One analysis on Solana found that you have these sandwich attacks every four seconds. Basically with MEV, you're having bots steal money from retail. If I could simplify this for the average person, you're having bots steal money from retail, because right now Solana has no Ethereum-style public mempool, but you still have the miners extracting value, favoring sophisticated actors. So basically insiders who are in a perfect position can set up things to steal money from retail by front-running. If you go to trade some meme coin on Solana, and then you have some insider who's got everything set up perfectly so that they see your transaction incoming, they put a transaction in front of yours, and the retail person pays more money and gets less coin. Meanwhile, the insider on the inside steals value. That's how you have single bots sometimes earning millions and millions of dollars just ripping off retail trades. This is a pretty bad first. Being such a popular meme coin casino infrastructure, you have bots just ripping off crypto retail at a massive scale. Meme coin traders using high slippage are just getting wrecked by this. The solution they have for this has not fixed it at all.
The FTX Shadow and the Token Overhang
Arguably one of the worst parts of this is the FTX shadow and the huge token overhang still sitting here all these years later. For everybody that hates the insiders and VCs getting all the money, Solana is not the chain for you, because Solana Foundation sold Alameda and FTX-related entities enormous blocks of Solana, millions and millions of tokens. Meanwhile, when FTX collapsed, Solana went down rapidly, and the FTX estate still sold 41 million locked Solana to institutional buyers. With the vesting schedules, you're going to have deals stretching into 2027 and 2028. There's no bull market that's going to go through all these token dumps. That's a huge amount of the total supply. Off the top of my head, 10% or so of the whole supply is sitting there in token unlocks that are going to get dumped on retail. You combine that with the inflation, and this is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Solana so far survived FTX, but the overhang from all of that is still wrapped up there. If you like the idea of a fair launch, this is the opposite of that. There are very dangerous drops in place from all these token unlock schedules coming. And the question is, who's positioned to win here? Retail sitting there buying right now at market price? Or institutions who bought locked Solana at a discount from the bankruptcy estate? And all the people who lost money having all this Solana sitting there on this exchange that had got all these tokens. This is a mess. Retail absolutely is set up to lose hard in Solana. Problem number 10: the casino is the product. Your entire business system right now for Solana is largely based on people launching junk coins that rug pull people.
The Casino Is the Product
One report looked at 100,000 tokens, with 76% of them being rug pulled. You have millions of meme coins that have been launched on Pump.fun. And most people across the board have done nothing but waste their time and lose money. What kind of business system is that, when your chain, one of the big things it's known for and that people are hyped up on and that create transactions, is people losing money investing in garbage coins? That is not a sustainable business model. At some point, either there's better infrastructure to do all this stuff on, which ICP has, or people get smart enough to stop doing this. So either way, the fee revenue has absolutely tanked since that last meme coin bubble, which hopefully we'll never have again. Meanwhile, every headline is a Solana metric based on the casino and all of this gambling on these meme coins. What happens to all of Solana's metrics when the meme coin casino goes quiet, like it has dropped so much in the last year, thankfully? What happens when there's a better infrastructure like ICP to build your meme coins on?
Users Keep Losing Money to Hacks
Problem 11: users keep losing money. There are so many times that Solana has been hacked, including just a couple of months ago, Drift was hacked for $285 million. Now, this didn't directly involve a hack on the Solana blockchain. This involved a protocol, quote, "on the Solana blockchain," getting things off the Solana blockchain hacked through social engineering. This is why you need better infrastructure. This is a very clear example, and there are other examples of this as well. These are just a few of them. You have hundreds of millions of dollars being lost in things like the Wormhole bridge between Solana and Ethereum, where 120,000 wrapped ETH were stolen. On Slope, an attacker drained 9,000 wallets through compromised private keys. And most recently, hundreds of millions of dollars on Drift being lost, crashing the Drift token.
You've got to ask, how many times, with people losing hundreds of millions of dollars collectively? Sure, the base chain and Solana Foundation can say, well, this isn't our fault, this chain itself didn't do that. And yes, that's true. But what happens when there is an infrastructure where you don't need bridges or separate wallets or all this stuff, and you can build all that on one infrastructure and stop all these kinds of things happening proactively? What happens when there is one crypto that can prevent the majority of these things happening by having everything directly on the blockchain? This is inevitable on Solana and the rest, especially as AI continues to rise.
As AI continues to advance, I see that crypto is going to get hacked into oblivion. Anyone who is not building on ICP and securing their full infrastructure on the blockchain, things like Drift are going to happen over and over again. I'm telling you this is going to happen. I'm telling you a train of AI hacking is coming, and the way this is built on Solana, it's unavoidable. It is a flaw of the blockchain itself. The blockchain is so simple, it can't run all the infrastructure on it. So even though technically the hacks are not directly the blockchain's fault, they are the blockchain's fault, because the blockchain is so basic it can't run the website and the backend and the code and the AI all on chain.
Regulatory Whiplash
Number 12: regulatory whiplash. In 2023, Solana was named by the SEC as having sold a security on Binance. It's not currently doomed by the SEC, but the thing is, how delicate is your position when one election can change whether your asset is a security or not, and how much of the value is fundamentals versus politics? Right now, all of crypto is in an extremely delicate place of being very politically vulnerable. If you crack down on all these BS coins, and I'd call Solana a BS coin, the blockchain itself does very little, has raised a huge value for itself, the infrastructure around it is all unstable and mostly insecure, and you put people in a position to consistently lose money. That's very vulnerable to attack from a regulatory standpoint.
So just because there have been some positive developments in the regulatory scene, don't kid yourself that a lot of these blockchains couldn't get crushed by regulation, especially if regulation was intelligent enough to say, look, if you're going to position yourselves as a crypto and a blockchain, your blockchain should do everything on chain, because you're exposing people to gigantic liabilities. If you've got them using some third-party wallet on some third-party web host and all that's supposedly tied into the blockchain, regulation could destroy Solana, and all these other coins that don't have a full-stack blockchain infrastructure. So that's a big wild card, and Solana has a lot to lose from regulation.
The Hype Machine and Ridiculous Price Calls
Number 13: the hype machine. I made sure to go through and study the videos that are hyping up Solana right now. They are so blatantly ridiculous. I'm not going to go through a bunch of them, but they avoid tackling the difficult questions. Here is a perfect example: there's a $600 call, saying that Solana could go to $600. That would be almost a 10x from where it's at today. That would also mean there'd be $20 billion of inflation instead of two every year. That means, aside from some financial engineering, you'd need people buying billions, if not tens of billions of dollars, of Solana just to keep the price even. Here's the scene of this video: during the middle of a brutal market downturn, the Market Bubble podcast hosts sat on a yacht in St. Barts while the CEO of a Solana infrastructure company laid out a bull case for why Solana could be $600. The co-host predicted that Solana goes from 60 to 600 this cycle. The math they skipped is that at 600 with Solana circulating, that would be over $276 billion, larger than massive revenue-generating global corporations, meanwhile justified by hoping retail gambles on meme coins.
Any intelligent investor that has two peanuts to click together for a brain is going to ask AI to look at and analyze this stuff. And when you ask AI the right questions, which I would imagine intelligent investors with lots of money will be asking, these are the answers AI is going to give them, about how ridiculous this is. Remember I talked about that FTX token overhang before? At $600 Solana, that FTX token overhang at 40 million tokens, do the math on that. You would be talking about having like 20 to 30 billion dollars just sitting in the token overhang by itself. Actually, I might have even missed a zero on there. There's a lot of token overhang. And the inflation, the fix, you can see that the vote cost would go up. This just turns into an absolute disaster.
Meanwhile, the HFT myth. The claim that price-insensitive high-frequency trading firms will accumulate Solana for speed advantages. These are the things people are using to hype Solana. Look how shallow this is. The high-frequency trading myth inverts reality. High-frequency trading platforms are not crypto retail noobs throwing their money around from watching a video. They're mathematically logical and rational actors. They will hold exactly the Solana they need, not a penny more, and dump all the excess. And then the host admitted he used Solana to send stablecoins back and forth. This is how bad the information in these hype videos is. This is why following me is so important, because I actually care about you and I want you to have the best information. Everybody watching these hype videos, look how shallow and absolutely easy to destroy this is. Is Solana built up right now to be worth like 50 or 60 or 80 billion dollars, basically as a free Venmo? Come on, man. This is ridiculous.
The $10,000 Solana Fantasy
You want to get more ridiculous? Let's talk about InvestAnswers. Someone said they have $12.50 buy orders for Solana. Well, that'd be a lot more reasonable than buying at $80 today, that's for sure. But even then, at $12.50 Solana, I don't think until Solana went down to a dollar or two would it be accurately valued, because the token, as I've said, there's so little value that comes into the token and the business system itself, and so much of all the perceived value that people think is in Solana is in all this stuff that's off-chain.
Now, InvestAnswers put out a video with a $10,000 price for Solana. InvestAnswers modeled nearly $1 trillion in demand for Solana by 2030 based on tokenized real-world assets, which is, first off, ridiculous in so many ways, because you can't put a full tokenized real-world asset on Solana. All you could do is send transactions and build the whole rest of the infrastructure off the blockchain. So I see no incentive to build in there unless you're getting bribed to do that. And then AI agents are a nightmare with Solana because of the infrastructure I just described, and consumer use too.
InvestAnswers, who's been a consistent Solana shiller and who actually turned me on to ICP, because I noticed he was presenting inaccurate information about ICP. When I did my own research and looked into ICP myself, I found he was, intentionally or apparently from my point of view, inexplicably not presenting the data for ICP accurately because it would make Solana look bad. This is the same person who got people into FTX and Terra Luna before they crashed, along with Celsius, I believe also. He's consistently gotten his followers absolutely wrecked over and over again. And this is a guy floating $10,000 per Solana. He also did a video where he featured me, one of my old pictures in my underwear. So I'm like, bro, I see you. Let's go. Let's see whose information works out to be most accurate in the future, and whose information is valued by somebody that's a billionaire that wants real research and not superficial hype stuff.
InvestAnswers at $10,000 per coin ignored the basic reality that Solana would then be worth $4.6 trillion, which would be bigger than Apple or Microsoft and roughly triple Bitcoin. This is how Solana is being hyped, with people using things like a $10,000 per Solana fantasy that has no basis in reality. And he was using the free-float fallacy here, saying, well, there's only 75 million Solana available because the rest is staked. He stakes Solana, as far as he says in his videos, and I did too. It doesn't take that long to unstake your Solana. You can pretty easily unstake your Solana and dump all of it. It's not locked for like a year or two or anything like some of these other ones. You can unlock it and dump it in a few weeks.
Thus, the staked argument is ridiculous, because if the price multiplies, within a few weeks you're going to have staked supply unstaking and flooding the markets to take profit. Absolutely. There are so many Solana holders now, too, that just want to exit at a profit and not be wrong. They don't care about the token or the ecosystem anymore. They're just down. They bought it at like $100 to $200, and they're sitting there waiting to get back to even. They don't believe in it anymore. They're ready to sell it as soon as they can sell it at a slight profit and say, well, I was right because I made 10%. That's a ton of the holders right now.
Then he's talking about how, for throughput, you'd be tokenizing hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate. The thing he's missing, though, is that tokenizing hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate does not involve buying a hundred million dollars of Solana. It requires a fraction of a penny in fees. Now, on ICP, all this stuff would make sense if you're actually building it all on the blockchain. But the reality of what he's saying, even if it really did happen, does not result in hardly any significant demand for the Solana token, because of everything I've told you about earlier.
Someone asked, what do you say to people who say the best tech rarely wins? Well, I say you must not be using AI image generation. You must not be using AI to do anything today. You must not be using the internet. You don't use Google Maps. You don't have an iPhone, do you? Because if you're using all that stuff, it proves that the best tech does win. The iPhone got to be the dominant smartphone because when you used it, it's like, wow, this is incredible what it can do. Look around you and you'll see. People use the Betamax and VHS argument, like, well, Betamax or LaserDisc, but we're not using any of that stuff today, are we? Because tech came along that made all that stuff irrelevant. You're not still messaging on AOL Instant Messenger, are you? You're not, because there's better technology available.
The $10,000 Fantasy Collapses
To wrap up the $10,000 fantasy: InvestAnswers admitted he threw out Metcalfe's law because it didn't give him the numbers he wanted. He called his own target Hopium and conceded a kid in a garage with AI can make Solana obsolete. Yeah, because the Solana tech is something that AI could absolutely reproduce, as far as I can see at this point. Meanwhile, ICP's tech, according to the calls I've had with people, which you can jump into one of if you want at skool.com/jerrybanfield, they've told me that billionaires are trying to use AI to reverse engineer ICP, and they're not trying to reverse engineer Solana. They're trying to reverse engineer ICP.
So I know the bulls will push back on, well, Solana has real uses, it's fast and cheap. Well, so what? ICP is faster and cheaper. Solana has real uses? Yeah, so does Ethereum and Base, and all these others have real uses too, and they all do the same basic thing. Whoa, inflation's coming down? Yeah, it's still billions of dollars a year. And how much is it coming down? The higher the price goes, the more the inflation in US dollars still. And then some of the bulls will say, well, FireDancer fixes this. No, it doesn't. It doesn't fix the token value capture, the app revenue leakage, validator economics, the MEV centralization, or casino-driven demand. So FireDancer doesn't fix hardly anything that actually matters for this whole scenario. Yes, it did recover from $10, because you have people like Vitalik Buterin stepping in to try and help it out when it's going down there. But as I'm going to show you, Solana is going into no man's land.
Questions No Bull Will Answer
There are questions that no bull will answer. And there's a future that is putting everything in crypto in question besides ICP. I think the next bull market, if people have intelligence and can do research, and if AI can communicate to them, the next bull market is going to be an ICP-only bull market. Maybe a couple other things. Here are the questions bulls need to answer, and every Solana holder should be trying to figure out how they can answer these too, because if you're holding the coin, these are the things that are in your way. If the fees stay near zero, where does the long-term security budget come from? Why should Solana holders accept billions in annualized inflation when the chain revenue is tiny? If apps capture far more revenue than the base chain, why is Solana the best way to own the growth? How much Solana activity is actually real economic demand versus junk? Why is the validator count down two-thirds? How decentralized is Solana when it appears to consistently be falling? Why would global financial infrastructure have a history of full network halts? If MEV moved into private channels, how's that better than Ethereum? What happens if the Solana meme coin casino never comes back? And why do all these early Alameda and FTX-linked sold deals have such long unlock schedules? How much of that is coming?
The Biggest Problem: ICP Makes Solana's Tech Look Useless
But the worst part, the biggest problem out of all this that almost no one sees coming, is that if there was no fundamentally better technology than Solana, Solana might be able to at least sustain itself. But there's technology that makes Solana look useless at this point, and it is ICP. Even if somebody copies ICP, even if a competitor comes out, there's no question at this point. There's such vastly superior technology that is real in the form of ICP, and could be reproduced and copied potentially at some point by somebody else, that Solana's tech is basically useless going into the future.
Right now, ICP is the only chain putting the entire stack on chain. And that makes for a much better casino than Solana. Right now, the best meme coin infrastructure, best Bitcoin ordinals infrastructure, best Bitcoin and Ethereum layer two, best way to build a real coin with a real DAO, the best way to stop and prevent cybercrime, the best way to build for AI, ICP answers all of that. And it's at a fraction of the market cap that Solana's at. So there's something vastly superior to Solana. There's a vastly better investment opportunity, not financial advice. It makes Solana look like crap.
Meanwhile, if you look at what Solana actually is, Solana is basically one of a bunch of these layer ones selling the same basic product. Imagine you have a bunch of vacuum cleaner salesmen coming to your door, all trying to sell you the same vacuum cleaner. And then somebody comes along and just has some magical thing that cleaned your entire house. It does all the dishes, like an AI robot that cleans your whole house and does all the dishes and makes the beds and does the laundry. Nobody's going to buy vacuum cleaners anymore, are they? And even if they do, there are a hundred different vacuum cleaners you could buy that all suck, like Solana. That's what Solana is. It's just another vacuum cleaner salesman. And there's a whole bunch of other chains. You've got Ethereum and Layer 2s, Sui, Aptos, Base. You have all these others competing in the exact same lane. They're all competing against each other. Then you have ICP. So that means even if ICP didn't exist, one of those others could out-compete Solana and wreck it by itself. But then you have ICP.
It's the only network hosting the entire application on-chain: front-end, back-end, data, identity, and cross-chain control. Canisters can bundle code and state, serve webpages straight from the chain. I just put another new webpage directly on ICP. You don't need oracles like Chainlink anymore. You can sign transactions on other chains. In fact, on ICP you could actually build the whole infrastructure and then just send the transactions on Solana. No one else even has anything at all like this running. Solana dominates in today's numbers that people look at. That means it has a lot to lose and constant competition that's after the same people, the same money. But ICP is in its own lane doing its own thing. And what it's doing is extremely valuable. Thus, Solana is already unsustainable in its current environment before hardly anybody even knows about ICP. Every new app, agent, or headline ICP gets out there, every new builder, every government that's onboarding ICP, it is in position to bring down all the other altcoins together. And Solana is one of the most vulnerable in this environment, because it already has such a big market cap.
This is a huge deal, because what most people holding Solana don't realize is that most everything that's quote "on Solana" is actually hosted on Web2: Amazon Web Services, front ends, Cloudflare, GitHub, RPC providers, admin keys sitting on laptops. The chain settles transactions, but everything else happens off chain. That's why the business model is so screwed up for Solana, because the chain itself is doing so little, and then there's all this perceived value for the coin, but the coin and the chain aren't doing that much.
Remember how I talked about the $285 million Drift hack? This is something that when you build on ICP, you can proactively prevent from happening. And with AI rising, AI agents need what the ICP blockchain offers: guaranteed to run smart contracts fully on chain that are verifiable. On Solana, you can't run AI on Solana. You can use AI to interact with the Solana blockchain, but you can't verify the inputs. You can't trust it without trusting a third party who could have your private keys on a laptop and get stolen. So what I see is AI-empowered hacking is going to continue to absolutely rip through and destroy all these projects on crypto. They're just one of the most lucrative things you can hack, a crypto project. There are just so many points of failure between the infrastructure and the blockchain and the money you can immediately transfer. It's not like trying to hack something and steal funds on a credit card company like Stripe or PayPal. You can take the money and launder it and move it around in the world of crypto. So right now, AI hacking poses a huge threat to all of crypto except ICP. And ICP offers the only solution to this. So I think the rest of these blockchains are going to get hacked into oblivion, and projects are going to move onto ICP for safety.
If you compare the revenue and the business model of ICP versus Solana, and I will do a dedicated stream comparing ICP and Solana further on my Jerry Banfield ICP channel, you can see right now, people complain about the ICP tokenomics, but Solana printed $2 billion in tokens in the last year. ICP, $44 million. That's 50 times more US dollar inflation from Solana than ICP. Meanwhile, if you look, the fees are only off by about 10 times. And that's with ICP having no marketing outside of people like me who aren't totally compromised and just saying anything to make the most amount of money possible.
ICP Has the Best Business Model in Crypto
ICP also has a business model where you're paying your web hosting bill by burning ICP, and that's where those fees are generated. Whereas Solana, the business model, as I've shown, is utterly unsustainable. ICP has the best business model in crypto right now. So if you look, ICP already runs multiple times as sustainably as Solana, and just cut the dilution down by 70%. So this is going down. Thus, to me, the question is the opportunity cost. If you're holding Solana, that's money you can't have in ICP. And to me, ICP's opportunity is so huge, I can't afford to invest in anything else, because I've got to have everything in ICP.
The question is, which number moves next? Does Solana shoot up, or does ICP shoot up? Which one has a realistic chance of 100Xing? In my opinion, this is not financial advice, ICP has a very realistic chance of 100Xing. Solana, I wouldn't say zero, maybe a 0.1% chance. So in 999 scenarios, you're not going to get 100X on Solana. And I would say ICP probably has an 80% chance of 100Xing at this point, in my view. So four out of five times, you're going to 100X with ICP. ICP's revenue scales with compute. You've got governance from Pakistan and Switzerland moving in. And to me, it's just insane holding Solana with everything I've told you.
I know with ICP, people talk about the rug pull. Well, who do you think manufactured that? FTX set it up, and Coinbase and Binance listed the coin insanely high. Why did they do that? They did that because they had a bunch of money. FTX had a bunch of money invested in Solana, and they were scared. They were trying to protect Solana, because they realized if people find ICP, they're not going to buy Solana. They're going to dump their Solana. You need to see how crypto is operating. If you assume that most of crypto is absolutely just obsessed with money and people are willing to say and do anything, then you can see the ICP rug pull, that's the main narrative used against it, that was manufactured to protect the existing things like Solana. And the only reason Solana is even around today is because people don't realize there's such vastly superior technology that's available now.
How the Bottom Falls Out for Solana
Here's how I see the bottom absolutely falling out for Solana. Stage one, builders and AI move first. Developers who want more than just basic trading apps and building infrastructure off-chain, and people using AI to build, like I personally have built five websites directly on ICP now with Claude Code and Caffeine AI. The developers and the AI builders are going straight to ICP already. And developers who are finding out about ICP, I've talked to them myself. I've seen other people in ICP talking to them. People who were building on Solana, I've seen them moving off of Solana, building on ICP. But what's crazy is you can build on ICP and still interact with Solana. But the revenue and the business value is accruing to ICP, while they use the token Solana and the community Solana to try and pump their own project. They're actually paying their web hosting bill to ICP. That's where the future is heading.
Stage two, Solana becomes plumbing, where now people build Solana apps on ICP just to keep them safe from hacking and to reduce their costs and their liabilities. Then the third thing, once most of the Solana apps start getting built on ICP for security and for simplicity, then the meme coins and casinos are mercenary. Right now, all this hype about Solana and meme coins, they don't care about the chain. Do you remember how easily people moved from Ethereum to Polygon to Solana, and have moved to some of these other chains? Anyone that's launching stuff just to make a profit, they don't care about the chain at all. The community, they're only looking for where the best opportunity is. So Solana has so much to lose, because Solana is in position to become the next Polygon. Polygon was huge for a while, but the bigger Solana got, the more Polygon fell off. And the bigger ICP gets, the more everything else is going to fall off.
My theory, what I'd like to see, is that the next bull run is going to be an ICP-only bull run. It'll be ICP and it'll be coins on ICP, because ICP has more to gain than any other coin from the price going up. So if that scenario plays out, Solana has a ton to lose.
The Lines to Remember
These are the lines to remember from the review as I wrap this up. Solana is one of many fast chains. ICP is the only full-stack chain. So Solana is one of many chains all doing the same crap. ICP is doing something in a different lane. Solana's numbers need the casino. They need uninformed, ignorant people not looking for details, who are so lazy they can't even be bothered to ask AI basic questions about the crypto coins they're holding, which unfortunately there are significant people that fall into that category. And back when I was holding all these coins, we didn't even have AI that could do any of this research. But the more people do research with AI, and the smarter AI gets, AI is going to give them better answers. And that's going against Solana.
Solana made gas cheap, but ICP makes gas invisible. $2 billion in inflation for Solana is absolutely unsustainable at current prices. Saying prices are going to go up is, in my opinion, absolutely insane at this point. And cybercrime is going to continue to thrive. As long as apps are built, quote, "on Solana" with all this off-chain infrastructure, cybercrime is going to destroy them. And AI agents, if you're hyped about that, they need ICP infrastructure, or you might as well use them on centralized infrastructure. There's no place for the blockchain to do anything besides basic transactions. When the casino finds a better opportunity than Solana, whether it's ICP or somewhere else, good game. It's over.
Yes, I understand ICP has some weak points. I understand that it's not a perfect comparison. I understand that my research is, there's a lot more that you can look at. To me, though, Solana must prove that its massive activity can ever create sustainable value for Solana. Meanwhile, ICP just has to prove that people will use the architecture. And I know firsthand that people will use the architecture, because it's amazing. So here's the question. Would you rather own a chain that has the crowd right now but leaks its value and has a very questionable future? Or would you rather have ICP, which has the best technology in crypto, that's drastically undervalued, that hardly anybody's talking about, and the only thing missing is the crowd? That's what I'm looking at. So Solana has the attention, but the engine, the business system under it, is absolutely broken and extremely dangerous. If you want to go deeper on how I evaluate these coins, you can watch my Crypto Reviews playlist.
I appreciate your love and support. We have weekly group calls, and you can join me and the community over at skool.com/jerrybanfield. You can post questions, you can post whatever you want, you can ask me about anything in there. The goal of the community is to create a life you love. Thank you. Have a great day.