Solana’s Co-Founder Highlights Network Benefits from Meme Coins

The surge in popularity of meme tokens on Solana has resulted in a stress test of the network aimed at enhancing its resilience. This was stated by the project’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, reports The Block.

During a discussion on stage at the Emergence conference in Prague, the entrepreneur joked:

“Blessed are the meme coin traders, for those who can overcome their spam will inherit the metaverse.”

He noted that the boom in assets helped Solana developers solve a number of technical issues, making the network more reliable.

In February, the blockchain experienced an outage shortly after the launch of the Pump.fun platform. In 2023, the network also stopped once, again in February, and was restarted on the second attempt. In 2022, a series of similar incidents were recorded.

“The problem with scaling the performance of multicore systems is that you face truly multidimensional challenges,” said Yakovenko.

Any bottleneck can cause a cascading effect, he added.

In creating a high-performance network, Solana developers have become accustomed to solving complex technical challenges. However, some obstacles could not be anticipated and addressed in advance with measures such as localized fee markets, Yakovenko noted.

“These problems… I’ve never seen anyone predict them in research, let alone have solutions for them,” he said.

He believes that Solana’s unified state provides faster, cheaper, and simpler solutions than other approaches, such as second-layer networks.

As an example, Yakovenko cited DEX Raydium, whose pools were used by “every meme coin” to launch. Although no one expected this, it did not require any additional actions from the platform, he emphasized.

“Can this be replicated within L2 and other systems that clearly separate state? Theoretically possible, but developers are lazy and will take the path of least resistance,” stated the founder of Solana.

Yakovenko admitted that the popularity of meme tokens was unexpected for him, although quite understandable.

“In virtually all digital economies, entertainment is the largest space where money is made. When you think about it, looking back, in retrospect, it’s all pretty obvious,” he said.

In February, experts concluded that the main cause of Solana’s periodic outages is the network’s inability to handle the growing volume of transactions.