Solana is a cryptocurrency where I see the price trending towards zero. It's greatly exaggerated in terms of the daily active users, and I'm going to give you an honest look into Solana and show you some surprising weak points that no one has probably ever pointed out to you before. I want to give you a bigger picture of Solana that will help you make smarter decisions, I hope, with your investing.
This is from someone who actually held it. I had Solana last year. Solana was one of my biggest crypto positions last year, along with Internet Computer, Bitcoin, and Deso. I looked at each of them and I did deep, deep, deep, deep research to figure out what am I really holding? Who am I really investing in? And what I found is that Solana ended up being shallow. Solana is basically an Ethereum copy with a couple of small changes. It's not the most advanced tech in crypto, but it has had a ton of money thrown at it to get people to build on it, to pay tokens, to move over to it.
In the last year, Solana has had some really nice price action, going from $15 to over $200. But let's remember how Solana was over $200 before and it dipped down under $10 when it crashed. In my opinion, this happens again. Why? Because this coin, to me, is all hype and speculation. The actual technology is a marginal improvement over Ethereum, and there is better technology out here. You can use it for yourself. Internet Computer Protocol, to me, is vastly superior technology.
Why developers really build on a chain
There are two basic reasons developers build on something. One, they build on it chasing users. So one reason you get a lot of action on Solana today is people are chasing daily active users. Almost every video about Solana focuses on the daily active users. But daily active users are very easy to fake with bots, and daily active users are something that can evaporate overnight, as we've seen repeatedly in different bull markets.
What doesn't evaporate overnight is technology and engineering and the power of the network. So let's look at the power of the network first to show where Solana is at. These are metrics no one shilling Solana will ever show you. In fact, I watched a lot of the Solana influencer shillers and they often would intentionally exclude Internet Computer Protocol, because it makes Solana look bad by comparison.
The raw computing power no one shows you
Here's what you should know. You need to think about the raw computing power of the underlying network, because almost everything that's quote "built on Solana" is actually built on Web2 infrastructure, which eliminates any decentralization. Nakamoto coefficients are irrelevant when all of your dApps have their websites hosted through a centralized point of failure, like a website hosted on Amazon. Then you do your NFT marketplace and all the pictures are hosted off chain. This is because the network itself has very little raw computation power.
If you look at the average millions of instructions executed per second, that gives you an idea of the raw computation the network itself is capable of doing. Internet Computer is at 20,000 millions of instructions executed per second. That means 20 billion instructions it can execute per second. Solana is at 90 million. Look at the difference in computation power, and look at the difference in storage. You have the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, saying on chain is the new online, and Internet Computer is the only one set up to do that. Is Solana prepared for that? No. On Solana, it will cost you approximately $35,000 to put a gigabyte of data on chain. Everything is hosted off chain. Almost the only reason anyone's excited about Solana is because no one tells you the facts about how the blockchain works.
What the transactions are actually doing
It gets worse than that. Let's look at the Solana Explorer. The transactions per second is about 500, which is way better than a lot of other cryptos you see. But what are those transactions actually doing? People are trading meme coins, DeFi, and stablecoins. Is that something that's going to explosively grow in the future, or is that hype? Is that hype and speculation? What exactly is that? Is that sustainable? To me, if your business model is built on trading meme coins, you're a distraction. You don't have real technology.
People say crypto is about the money. It is, because the money is trying to invest, and the money is trying to invest in the technology. So look at the technology. There's like a thousand or so vote transactions that kind of artificially inflate the transactions per second. You'll never see somebody reviewing Solana that will show you this. So if you're excited about Solana's transactions per second, look at Internet Computer: more than 10 times as many transactions per second as Solana, if you strip out the fake vote transactions. The Solana explorers by default don't even make those very easy to look at. Internet Computer is at around 2,000 transactions per second, literally doing double the transactions per second that Solana is right now. The Solana people that are paid shillers for it will not include this at all in their comparisons, because it makes Solana look bad.
But think about what the Internet Computer transactions are doing. Most of the Solana transactions are vote transactions and meme coin transactions, and you're looking at the network fees of companies that are trading meme coins. I guarantee you, in my opinion, that doesn't work out long term. What does work out long term is building a computation platform that is the only real third-generation blockchain, where you can build every single thing in an application fully on chain. That is breakthrough technology, and that's Internet Computer. So as long as Internet Computer exists, Solana looks like basically an Ethereum copy that's just got a lot of marketing behind it by comparison. And that doesn't make a good investment to me.
Show me the engineers
To me, the worst proof of this is when you try to find the people who are actually working on Solana. For all the people who are hyped up on Solana, one thing that almost never gets talked about is who is working on Solana. I want to see the engineers that are building Solana. Show me the engineers, show me the money. On Internet Computer Protocol, you go to DFINITY.org, for example. Almost no one who shills Solana will ever tell you any kind of real research about Internet Computer, because as soon as you see what Internet Computer is, Solana looks bad. I was going to make some crude analogy about how Solana is the unattractive person with a bad personality you wouldn't want to date, and Internet Computer is the hot sister in crypto. So there it is.
Internet Computer has the largest research and development team in all of blockchain. They have a huge amount of technical staff. The payroll must be nuts, because you've got people from IBM, Google, Meta, and Amazon. You've got a ton of engineers, PhDs, cybersecurity cryptographers. This is a deep staff. You can watch video after video after video of them talking about what they're building on the protocol and in the technology, and then you can actually easily use that yourself.
You can see how easy the staking is. On Solana, when you stake, you're delegating to a validator. You're not even actually getting to vote yourself; you're delegating to a validator. On Internet Computer, you're actually getting to stake it and make the decisions yourself.
But the worst part about Solana is the Solana Foundation. Do you see what I just showed you for DFINITY? Now I want you to show me which engineers are working on Solana. Who are the actual people building on Solana? You can see the Internet Computer and DFINITY people are real proud to have their profiles. They've got pictures up and they talk about what they do, and many of these people present in presentations, so you know they're real. They're not just made up. Now, who's working on Solana? If you search for the Solana Foundation, you'll notice there are no pictures. There's an executive director and a council member. Where are the engineers that are actually building the technology?
I'm going to let you in on something that might be a bit of a secret, and maybe it's a little theoretical on my mind: there are hardly any engineers actually working on building Solana. This was created as quickly and as fast as possible to scrape as much money off of crypto investors as possible. I would doubt there are more than five or ten real engineers and cryptographers actually working on the blockchain itself. I would imagine almost all the money is going into marketing and getting people to build on it. But that's a short-term strategy. As soon as people discover what Internet Computer and DFINITY does, and they're building on it organically for free because it's the best tech, people are going to keep migrating off Solana. I've talked to a developer who said, yeah, I would never build on Solana after understanding what Internet Computer does.
The DSCVR example: Solana on the surface only
Here's how disingenuous the entire Solana ecosystem is. There's a website called DSCVR. DSCVR was built on Internet Computer Protocol. Now, it is not fully on chain, unlike things like OpenChat, which are fully on chain. The Solana people were excited about somebody trying to send an email on chain. Internet Computer has been sending emails on chain for years, and Solana can't even do more than send a simple text on chain, as the numbers show. That's just technical facts.
So look at this application named DSCVR. It's pitching itself as a Web3 social media platform. They were all in on Internet Computer before, and then they went over to Solana. You can't really compare the two: Solana is basically like a wallet sign-in. It's not built on the chain itself. It's more like if you use Facebook to sign into Spotify. Spotify is not built on Facebook. You use your Facebook login to sign into Spotify, and then Spotify does everything. DSCVR is built on Internet Computer Protocol and on regular Web2 stuff, so some of it's on chain and a lot of it's off chain. They built on Internet Computer and got an initial community. Then they went over to Solana chasing daily active users, and they got a lot of users.
They partner with Magic Eden to sell a bunch of NFTs to make themselves money and to get themselves users. So all these Solana users sign in with their wallets. They're using something that's not even on chain. This is not on Solana, aside from signing in with their wallet. You're not doing a transaction on Solana every time you post. On OpenChat, depending on how it's set up, you are doing a transaction on Internet Computer every time you post. And if you look at DSCVR, it's all about Solana now, and that's because they're catering to getting themselves a website and the most daily active users they possibly can with the least possible effort. If Solana stops cranking out daily active users, they'll go somewhere else. All they care about is getting the users. Solana's got users now, but it's not going to have users in the future. Why? Because the money's going to run out, and then who's going to pay you to build on Solana? If you choose to build there for free, you wouldn't, because there are better options.
So DSCVR is a perfect example. On the surface, it looks like Solana, but the way it's actually built involves hardly anything with Solana. It's not real Web3, it offers no real value. To me, it's a total deception, in the sense that there's no decentralization, because the DSCVR team has total control over this, and Solana has almost nothing to do with it. This is simply something on the surface. And things that are on the surface tend to fade and go to zero and crash. If you want a side-by-side of how I think this debate actually plays out, I broke it down in destroying Solana in a debate vs ChatGPT.
FTX, the phone, and the manipulated pump
We know the FTX bankruptcy estate has a bunch of Solana, which is why there was this, in my opinion, totally manipulated pump up here to get the price higher, to get the FTX bankruptcy estate in a position where it can dump all the Solana. To me, this inevitably is going to crash again.
The Solana mobile phone has this same energy. This is something created just to make hype. I listened to this last year. They didn't even seem to have much confidence they'd get a decent amount of daily active users for it. We don't really need another phone. What we need is a blockchain that can actually serve directly through a web browser, like Internet Computer does.
My call: I think Solana goes to zero
So I'm putting this on my spreadsheet. I'm going to say today, I'm going to add this on my spreadsheet, and we're going to track over time my accuracy. I think Internet Computer is a vastly superior investment to Solana at this time. In my opinion, Solana is going to go to zero and become irrelevant at basically any time. I think it's going to crash again like it did to under $10, and something like Internet Computer is going to go soaring up. Solana has all kinds of other competitors. It's competing with BNB, it's competing with Ethereum, it's competing with Avalanche. But to me, nothing's competing with Internet Computer Protocol. It's really just ignorance versus knowing better.
So to me, Solana is an extremely high-confidence call: I think this goes to zero, it all falls apart, and it's probably going to crash rather quickly. The price may even go up until it crashes suddenly. Maybe the whole network goes down, there's some critical failure, or people just slowly realize that this is not fully on chain and this isn't real Web3. It could bleed out slower, or it could crash. But I seriously doubt this will work out well for you. This is my opinion and my experience, not financial advice.
Nobody's paying me to say this. I'm just giving this to you because almost nobody wants to say it. Who wants to be out here criticizing something when they could instead be getting paid a bunch of money? Most of the people who are talking about Solana are either getting paid, or they've got big bags of it and they're trying to get them inflated further, or they're trying to get views out of it. We know FTX and Solana were tied up heavily together, and in my opinion they contributed to sabotaging Internet Computer's price. So this, to me, has purely bad vibes and pure manipulation, even as high as it is today. That won't last forever. The subterfuge won't last, as the Wolf says in Pulp Fiction. If you've been holding altcoins through all of this, you might appreciate my reasoning in why I'd sell Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, and SOL for ICP before it's too late — and I keep the full archive of these honest breakdowns going in my Money playlist.
I filmed this in response to viewers asking me for my opinion about Solana, so here it is. If you enjoyed this, come back for more honest crypto reviews.