image

Is it another Solana Solstice already? 2023 seemed to fly by — an eventful year marked by challenges and opportunities. And as the community looks back at another year, it’s important to remember how far we’ve come.

The beginning of 2023 was the depths of the coldest winters, a difficult time for people across the Solana ecosystem and the greater blockchain community. The Solana community not only stuck around, but doubled down. 

An organic rallying cry, “only possible of Solana,” encapsulated the attitude of those who kept building. The Solana ecosystem may be the place where low fees and high throughput unlocks new use cases, sure, but it’s also the place where an engaged, vibrant, organic community leads above all. The highlights and victories from 2023 aren’t the work of any one team or any individual, but belong to the greater collective of builders, artists, leaders, and users that makes Solana Solana.

Solana belongs to you. From those of us at the Solana Foundation, thank you.
Here’s how you made 2023 the year of the Solana community.

A community-led resurgence

In December 2022, people started receiving something strange in their wallets: a token with a shiba inu logo. They got them for using Solana dApps and projects, for joining events, and being active participants in the Solana community. 
One year later, Bonk mania has swept the web3 world.
https://twitter.com/bonk_inu/status/1735344728995139609

The story of Bonk is the story of the Solana ecosystem’s renaissance in 2023 — and how it was led by the community. Plans that were laid months or years earlier began to bear fruit, and the people who stuck around and built during uncertain times became the new community leaders. After a year of building momentum, the Solana ecosystem took off once again.
For example, 2023 was the year Solana Mobile’s Saga came to market. Despite excitement around the initial announcement and launch, it wasn’t until excitement from the community exploded that the flagship web3-native mobile device sold out in December 2023.
https://twitter.com/solanamobile/status/1735835498025832651

In February, the Helium community voted to migrate from their own layer-1 blockchain to Solana. The migration happened at the end of March… and happened without a hitch, proving that Solana has a home for decentralized infrastructure projects and laying the path for future teams to make the leap themselves.
https://twitter.com/helium/status/1648725076571766786

This was the year of Solana DeFi 2.0 — new sets of tools and projects, led by the decentralized community, that enable the next generation of finance: Maple Finance returned to Solana with tokenized t-bills; Pyth moved to community governance of its Solana Permissioned Environment; TBTC brought BTC to Solana; Armada launched open source token infrastructure; the launch of multiple new stablecoins; and much more. A few days ago, Solana 24 hour DEX volume exceeded Ethereum’s for the first time in history.
https://twitter.com/DegenerateNews/status/1735842380257869974

And community-led validator infrastructure continued to move forward. As one of the most decentralized chains in web3 by Nakamoto coefficient, alternative validator clients like Jump Crypto’s Firedancer, the Jito Labs client, and Tinydancer continued to diversify and secure the Solana tech stack
https://twitter.com/solana/status/1719310929593057720

Developers innovating

Innovations within the Solana ecosystem moved at a breakneck pace in 2023, as teams collaborated to introduce new standards and tools for the entire community. Perhaps nothing epitomizes this more than the cross-ecosystem team working to implement state compression, an innovation that uses Merkle trees to significantly reduce the cost of rent on the Solana network.
https://twitter.com/solana/status/1643972968433975296

Similarly, Solana Labs introduced a plugin that let AI interact with the Solana blockchain, allowing developers to create useful tools that brought the power of the blockchain and artificial intelligence together.
https://twitter.com/solanalabs/status/1650955017585606656

It wasn’t just big teams working — the Solana developer community continued to grow. Two Solana hackathons, Grizzlython and Hyperdrive, saw a record number of applications and submissions. Hyperdrive had over 900 projects submitted, the largest number of submissions to date – despite the rough market conditions.
https://twitter.com/mattytay/status/1720579154737873218

It’s all because the developer experience of building on Solana continues to improve — instead of the old meme of building on the Solana blockchain being like chewing glass, today it’s more like surfing glass. New developer resources and tooling has enabled thousands of developers to build the decentralized app of their dreams. (Learn more at the developer portal on Solana.com)