Solana: reframing the narrative
2023–2024[Standfirst. One paragraph on why you took this position in mid-2023, when the consensus read on Solana was still post-FTX wreckage. The claim in your own words.]
The argument
[What you actually argued, in your own framing rather than the report's. The core of it: that chain ecosystems should be judged as technology platforms optimised for particular businesses, and that Solana had made deliberate trade-offs in node requirements to reach unit costs and throughput that EVM chains could not price at any transaction fee.]
[The mechanism you leaned on — Firedancer for throughput, state compression for cost, local fee markets for isolation — and why you thought consumer applications and DePIN were where that would show up first.]
[The uncomfortable part of your own analysis: unweighted against Ethereum, Solana lost. Your case rested on weighting toward future business model innovation over the state of play. Say why you thought that weighting was the right one.]
What held up
[Three years on. Which parts you would defend without revision, and what the evidence is.]
What I got wrong
[The parts that did not survive. The valuation work is the obvious place to be honest — a theoretical floor derived from a first pass at a framework is the kind of number that ages fastest. Say what you would not write again, and what you learned from it.]
What I would write now
[Where the argument goes in 2026. Whether the thesis was right for the reasons you gave, or right for reasons you missed.]
The original
The full research report — roughly 8,000 words on Firedancer, state compression, local fee markets, the application layer, a stack comparison against Ethereum, and a first pass at a Multicoin-style valuation framework — was published by Messari.
Read it at Messari →