Author: David Hoffman, Co-Founder of Bankless

Translation:金色财经 xiaozou

I've just wrapped up my final conference of the year—events where I get to meet many cool people and see incredible innovations in crypto. I enjoy traveling to interesting places around the world for these gatherings. But the last event of 2023 was unlike the typical crypto conferences I attend!

This was my first time attending a non-Ethereum conference.

And it wasn't a generalist event like Permissionless either. I attended Solana Breakpoint, hosted by the Solana Foundation.

Right now, forming a grounded, rational judgment is difficult. As someone deeply embedded in the Ethereum community, my only view into Solana has been through Twitter—a terrible lens, poorly suited for understanding anything today, especially in crypto. Crypto Twitter is full of tribal battles, constantly pushing narratives to sway perception in their favor.

So, I decided to look at Solana from the outside in.

If Crypto Twitter fails to show the real picture of Solana, what better way than going directly to Breakpoint and seeing things firsthand?

In this article, I’ll share everything I learned at Solana Breakpoint.

1. An Introduction to the Solana Community

My primary goal at this event was to understand the makeup of the Solana community. Who is being drawn into this ecosystem? And why?

Solana has attracted a type of engineer that Ethereum hasn’t. These are former Apple, former Tesla, former SpaceX engineers—people who understand the relationship between hardware and software, strong technical optimizers. Solana offers them a meaningful way to work that Ethereum does not.

In fact, some priorities within the Ethereum community might seem pointless and time-wasting to this group. This may be why Chris Burniske characterizes the Ethereum community as “optimists” and “ideologically driven,” while the Solana community is made up of “pragmatists.”

To me, crypto “pragmatists” find a natural home in the interplay between hardware and software in crypto networks, whereas the ideologically driven focus more on open-source software, where value, governance, and identity can be coded.

Those viewing crypto through the lens of Crypto Twitter, upon hearing I was going to Solana Breakpoint, probably thought: “Oh no, David’s going behind enemy lines!!”

In reality, the Solana community is simply another crypto community. People here don’t think in terms of tribal divisions. Hackers participate in both Ethereum and Solana hackathons, as well as StarkNet, Near, and Chainlink events. Some builders stay because they’ve found problems they’re passionate about solving.

I met the team from Marinade (an automated staking platform on Solana), and Anoushk and Harsh, the duo building Tinydancer, a light client for Solana. Both teams expressed gratitude for Bankless’ long-running content, with the Tinydancer pair saying Bankless was what originally brought them into crypto.

These kinds of interactions at crypto conferences are always deeply satisfying—and endlessly motivating! Every time I return from such events, I immediately sync with Ryan on all these encounters because I love sharing the genuine positivity and great vibes that exist in the real-world crypto space.

All this is to say: the real-world Solana community isn’t so different from the real-world Ethereum community. It’s the extreme internet figures in each camp that define the internet-native identities of these ecosystems.

2. What Was the Vibe Like?

This was the third-ever Solana Breakpoint. The first took place at the absolute peak of the 2021 market bubble, when SOL hit over $250. The second occurred just one week before the FTX collapse.

It’s safe to say Solana Breakpoint has never been held under stable market conditions—until now. In my view, this is the first time Solana could receive genuine signals from the community gathered at Breakpoint. In prior years, during bull markets, Solana attracted large crowds of short-term speculators (and scammers). I didn’t attend the first two Breakpoints. The following insights come from conversations with those who did.

Kudos to Solana Breakpoint for being the only conference to generate buzz without chaos.

-- David Hoffman, November 1, 2023

The vibe at Solana Breakpoint reminded me of my early days in the Ethereum community—but with its own unique flavor.

First, there was a palpable sense that the Solana community is sitting on gold. They know they possess something the rest of the world will want someday. That “pre-rich” belief is definitely present. I wouldn’t say it’s universal… certainly only a minority feel this way. Others are more indifferent. But it exists. This naturally brings a fresh optimism and excitement—something I clearly remember from early Ethereum, especially at ETH Denver in 2018 and 2019.

3. Solana vs. Ethereum

The main stage content centered around scaling. The session that best captured the mood was the 90-minute opening keynote by Solana leaders. (The event coincided with Halloween—Anatoly dressed as a green dragon.)

Hearing direct jabs at Ethereum during the keynote was fascinating. At this point, jokes about “no need for layers” and “not aligning with Ethereum” are core parts of Solana’s DNA. Clearly, Crypto Twitter has become embedded in Solana culture—and this was the aspect I found hardest to resonate with.

Solana’s identity has been shaped significantly by the need to survive post-FTX collapse, while the Ethereum community criticized Solana’s application layer for rampant value extraction and questioned the consistency of its monolithic scaling approach. When Solana was at its lowest, the Ethereum community wasn’t kind.

It was precisely at that moment that the Solana community gritted its teeth, persisted, and clawed its way out of a toxic narrative environment. Commentary on Solana was brutal, chaotic.

VCs stopped funding Solana-based projects simply because they were built on Solana. SOL’s market cap dropped to $4 billion—less than half of Ethereum’s bottom in 2018–2019, a period when Ethereum itself faced widespread concerns about fundraising viability.

I’m fairly certain it was at this point that Solana’s leadership took direct, hands-on control to reshape the narrative before it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is when Mert’s army of replies began mobilizing, when you’d see Anatoly responding to every single tweet about Solana, good or bad. That’s when Solana started crafting new narratives and memes to re-energize the community.

Credit where it’s due—they succeeded wildly. The narrative around Solana gained renewed meaning and momentum, with Twitter engagement nearly going viral. The Ethereum community mistakenly tried to “end” Solana by tying it as closely as possible to FTX, playing a major role in creating the negative environment Solana had to rebuild from.

Now, Solana has emerged from the bear market unscathed. The entire project now knows Ethereum is not its ally—which is why we saw direct jabs at Ethereum on the main stage at Solana’s annual summit.

Maybe I’m overthinking this! But collective tribal spirit is one of the most compelling aspects of this industry for me. While I often find myself engaging in tribal warfare just like everyone else, this shared spirit always reminds us how we can improve—even when our L1s are fundamentally competing.

4. What Is the Solana Community Excited About?

Rebirth and early positioning are exciting, but technically speaking, nearly every Breakpoint attendee was most excited about Firedancer.

Firedancer is a new Solana client built by the Jump Crypto team. The original Solana client, developed by the Solana Foundation, carries significant technical debt and lacks optimization. The Firedancer client promises major improvements in network performance.

You can think of Firedancer as a major network upgrade for Solana—or if you like, Solana 2.0. The level of excitement resembles Ethereum’s EIP-1559 or The Merge, except focused purely on performance.

The announcement of the Firedancer testnet at Breakpoint sent the entire community into a frenzy. Exploring what this means for Solana and validator economics goes slightly beyond my expertise—perhaps we’ll cover it in a future Bankless article.

Firedancer also unlocks a crucial feature: Solana is evolving into a multi-client network. Single-client networks are fragile and prone to downtime. With Firedancer, Solana now has a second client, significantly boosting reliability.

Of course, running a hybrid network—one part Firedancer, one part the old Foundation client—won’t work, since the entire network would be bottlenecked by the older client. But in my conversation with Austin, he explained the proposed architecture: Firedancer client operators would use the old Solana client as a backup, running Firedancer as the primary. Clearly, this offers the best of both worlds.

Another thing that caught my attention was Solana’s Token22 package. Token22 is an enhanced token standard that adds powerful new features to Solana tokens, including custom permissions and confidential transactions—i.e., privacy.

5. So, Am I Bullish on Solana?

Solana has recently captured more of my attention. What’s going on? Has Bankless finally gone bullish on Solana? Or has David simply been seduced by the Solana community—let’s attack him in the Twitter narrative wars? Or is it something else?

Honestly, I don’t have a clear answer. I felt frustrated when Chris Burniske recently tried to force me on Twitter to pick either bullish or bearish.

How I’ll engage with the Solana community will be determined by time. I do know I deeply resonate with the Ethereum community, and that ethos still doesn’t translate to the Solana community.

At a panel on Solana’s validator economics, the room was packed. But the very next session—a discussion on the future of Solana’s community governance—was nearly empty. That was genuinely disheartening.

David Hoffman was one of the few attendees left. How ironic.

— ZenLlama, November 5, 2023

Putting on my Solana bear hat: this is the obvious outcome of a network that compromised on decentralization, betting it can gradually achieve it over time. It attracts a community less concerned about decentralization than others in the industry, and this is reflected in low engagement around community ownership and decentralized governance.

Or perhaps the conversation has only just begun. On this front, I’m bearish—for now. Time will tell!

That’s everything I learned at Solana Breakpoint!