As some crypto companies find mainstream adoption through partnerships, alliances or deals with big brand names, others are working to the beat of their own drum and not worrying about whether a major label is following them. Yes or No.
Solana, a layer-1 blockchain launched in 2020, is one of the largest on-chain developers to build. Excluding stablecoins, Solana is the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with roughly $7.6 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
“Solana Has The Potential To Be The Apple Of Crypto,” Says Co-Founder Raj Gokal told TechCrunch+. For many years, Apple focused on two things: user experience and performance, he said. “I think about Apple, working for close to a decade on latency for touchscreens to allow the iPhone to come out and it just felt like magic.”
“A lot of things had to be built on top of that platform to get the iPhone and the App Store and the app ecosystem where it is today,” Gokal said. “But it all started with a relentless focus on a simple conversation that had to work perfectly.”
This is the focus of Solana’s core engineering and ecosystem, he said. The key is to create a network “that feels like the regular Internet, when it’s the whole new financial Internet.”
It’s also worth mentioning that Solana is trying to compete with Apple through its own Web 3-centric Android smartphone, the Saga, which debuted to the public in April (I got to test one). Solana says Saga was launched to make crypto products and services more accessible to users through phones instead of the traditional way of accessing crypto platforms and applications: using a computer.
The network is doing a lot to keep itself fresh and competitive. “The core thesis is going to be [focused on] New businesses, new projects, independent developers,” Gokal said. “We are still in an ecosystem and a community that is optimistic about what two developers in a garage can do.”
