Solana's association with FTX (Alameda Research held large SOL positions) caused its price to crater 95% from peak. Many wrote it off. But the underlying developer activity told a different story — teams kept building through the downturn, and 2023 saw a meaningful resurgence.
Throughput: Solana processes thousands of transactions per second at fractions of a cent in fees. For use cases like high-frequency trading, real-time gaming, and micropayments, this matters.
Parallel execution: Solana's Sealevel runtime processes non-overlapping transactions in parallel — something Ethereum's EVM still cannot do natively.
Integrated tooling: The Solana ecosystem has converged on a cohesive developer experience: Anchor framework, Metaplex for NFTs, and tight Phantom/Backpack wallet integration.
DeFi: Jupiter aggregator, Orca, and Raydium handle the majority of DEX volume. Total Value Locked recovered to multi-billion levels by mid-2023.
NFTs: Tensor marketplace surpassed Magic Eden in volume. The Compressed NFT standard made minting millions of NFTs economically viable for the first time.
Consumer apps: Dialect, Blinks (Solana Actions), and the Saga mobile phone represent bets on Solana as a consumer-facing platform.
Payments: Visa piloted USDC settlement on Solana in 2023, validating the network's suitability for institutional payment rails.
Solana suffered several notable outages in 2021–2022. In 2023, the network ran without a full outage for most of the year — a significant improvement. The QUIC networking upgrade and stake-weighted QoS changes addressed the bot spam that had previously caused congestion.
SOL staking yields ~6–8% APY with a 2–3 day unstaking period. Liquid staking via mSOL (Marinade) or jitoSOL (Jito) maintains liquidity while earning staking rewards, making it one of the more practical staking setups in crypto.
Solana in 2023 is a more mature, more resilient network than the one that collapsed with FTX. Whether it challenges Ethereum's dominance long-term remains an open question, but dismissing it as dead was clearly premature.