How Solana accomplished one of Web3’s most remarkable recoveries

By early 2023, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Solana was finished. Certainly, it had been left for dead by much of the wider industry. But the network’s story did not end there. Instead, it accomplished one of the most remarkable recoveries in Web3 history — not fueled by institutional backing or VC largesse, but by a committed community and a new wave of experimentation that would redefine what Web3 stood for.

The first and perhaps most important shift came in Solana’s branding. Early on, Solana positioned itself as an institutional blockchain. It was supposed to be a high-speed network for the next generation of DeFi power users — it likened itself to a “decentralized Nasdaq” at the time. But the institutional money was gone, and many of the polished financial products built atop these promises had crumbled. In their place, a grassroots, community-driven movement began to fill the void, leaning hard into the irreverent culture of the internet: self deprecating humor, in-group copy pastas, and most of all — memes.

Solana became the people’s chain.

The shift was crystallized by the rise of Bonk, a memecoin launched in late 2022. Unlike most corporate-backed projects, Bonk was distributed widely to the community, embodying a playful but deeply resonant ethos. It brought new users to the ecosystem and restored some of the energy that had been lost in the fallout from FTX. As the perceived value of memes gained social purchase, the air became electric once more with the promise of crypto’s “next big thing.” Sensing this change in fortunes, a trio of English entrepreneurs — Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler — opened Pump.fun in January 2024. It was a cultural force. The platform made it easier (and cheaper) than ever to create and trade tokens with near-instant execution. This democratization fueled an explosion of speculative but highly engaging onchain activity.

Simultaneously, Solana was making serious technical strides. Blinks introduced a new paradigm for seamless, native blockchain transactions where users could transact right from their X feeds. Firedancer, a new validator client developed by Jump Crypto, entered development with the goal of improving network stability and reducing the risk of outages. State compression technology allowed for dramatically lower costs for minting and storing non-fungible assets. Smart wallets leveraged account abstraction to replace traditional seed phrases with multifactor authentication.