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The Solana X mob was woke up after Avara CEO Stani Kulechov accused the Solana DeFi challenge Kamino of copying Aave’s tech — on high of getting a “half-baked” UI, amongst different issues.
Kulechov’s remarks set off a spherical of snipes on Crypto Twitter, however whereas his Kamino criticism might have been overplayed, his sentiment did contact on an actual pattern outdoors of the borrow-lend world. As Solana’s tech matures, some founders are beginning new companies based mostly on outdated concepts that weren’t previously possible.
The chain’s fundamentals — sub-cent transaction charges, hundreds of transactions per second, and a 12 months of uninterrupted uptime — have created an atmosphere the place ideas that when struggled on different blockchains may now thrive.
“Revisiting issues that didn’t work just a few years in the past is typically extra beneficial than imagining new ones,” Inversion Capital founder Santiago Santos wrote on X this week.
On a forthcoming episode of the Lightspeed podcast, I requested Santos to call some concepts that deserve a second crack. His reply: crypto gaming and choices protocols. Perpetual futures are clearly a profitable enterprise, he added, however onchain DeFi choices much less so.
One other outdated thought which may be breaking by means of is social buying and selling, which has been a recurring theme in crypto for years — particularly within the type of copy buying and selling. Tensor’s social memecoin buying and selling app Vector is already lapping the annualized income from its Solana NFT market.
A pair weeks in the past, Tensor’s co-founder informed me Vector would succeed the place different apps haven’t due to its modern Robinhood-esque packaging and the inherently social nature of memecoins — for which Solana appears to have an insatiable urge for food.
On the institutional aspect of issues, take a look at Sol Methods: Tasked with turning round a flagging crypto holding firm, new CEO Leah Wald took an eerily related method to the one pioneered for bitcoin by Michael Saylor with Technique (previously MicroStrategy). I’ve already predicted just a few different MicroStrategy for Solana equivalents will come to market this 12 months.
Tech historical past reveals that the winners aren’t essentially the primary movers however the most effective executors. Solana builders consider they’ve constructed the infrastructure for these second probabilities to succeed.
“The iPhone could be an ideal instance as there have been different makes an attempt at smartphones earlier than, however Apple got here on the proper time, proper place,” Titan Alternate CEO Chris Chung mentioned. “Hopefully Solana can present the groundwork for some revolutionary concepts to happen as properly.”
