Author: Shigeru, CryptogramVenture FoF researcher
Compilation: Russell
Editor's note: 2021 is the "Warring States Era" of public chains. Public chains such as Solana, Avalanche, and Terra have successively become market stars, and Solana is particularly dazzling. The data shows that Solana is the main gathering place for developers other than Ethereum. Why do developers favor Solana so much? The author of this article, CryptogramVenture FoF researcher Shigeru, believes that Solana has the ultimate user experience, strong ecological support, and other similarities with Apple’s iOS. Will Solana Really Be the Apple iOS of the Crypto World? We hope that by compiling this article, readers can get to know Solana from another angle. The text is as follows:
If you own an Apple mobile phone and happen to be a fan or active participant of the Solana system and applications, maybe you will have a feeling of deja vu at many moments when you use them separately.
Solana and Apple iOS are similar in many ways? This seems to be just a hunch. However, when I try to analyze the two from the history and the current situation, and compare them carefully, the result may surprise you even more: the previous intuition may be very close to a certain truth, and even a bold idea emerged in my mind. Prediction: One day in the future, Solana may truly become Apple's iOS in the encrypted world.
In my opinion, although Apple iOS and Solana belong to two different tracks of the Internet and the encrypted world, the logic of the first principle behind the development is very similar (the following materials and conclusions are jointly completed by the CGV FOF research team .)
User experience, as the core competitiveness of a product, has been mentioned time and time again. The iOS system always seems to be smoother than the Android system, which is behind Apple's unremitting efforts for the ultimate user experience.
The virtual keyboard is not the first of Apple's mobile phones. Smartphone manufacturers such as Microsoft and Palm have tried to promote smart phones with full touch screens. However, the iPhone has broken through the difficulties of capacitive touch screen and multi-touch technology, and has improved the ultimate touch experience to An unattainable height.
For example, iOS has the highest priority for screen response, and its response order is Touch--Media--Service--Core architecture. Simply put, when the user touches the screen, the system will give priority to processing The screen display (Touch) level; while the priority response level of the Android system is the Application-Framework-Library--Kernel architecture, and the display-related graphics and image processing part (Library) only ranks third. There are many similar factors, which directly lead to a huge difference in user experience.
Similarly, although Solana is not the first underlying public chain to come out, relying on ultra-high TPS and low transaction fees, it has broken through the biggest development constraints of most public chains in the same period and conquered more and more encryption developers. and users.
For example, Solana can support more than 50,000 transactions per second while maintaining a block generation time of 400 milliseconds. At the same time, it binds the improvement of TPS to Moore's Law, thereby providing a kind of "predictability" of TPS expansion. In addition, Solana's low execution fee is even more impressive: the network transaction cost of 1 million transactions is only about $10.
Among them, Solana's core consensus mechanism is "Proof of History (PoH)", which aims to solve the time problem in a distributed network that lacks a single reliable time source. With a verifiable delay function, PoH allows each node to generate timestamps locally using the SHA256 algorithm. The advantage of this is that it eliminates the need to broadcast timestamps in the network, thereby improving the efficiency of the entire network.
The experience of using the public chain can be reflected by one indicator - the number of encrypted wallets and the frequency of use. Take Phantom, one of the most popular wallets on Solana, as an example. It integrates basically all the functions of the Solana ecosystem, including: token swap, collection of NFT and collectibles, connection to hardware wallets, anti-surveillance, Web3.0 support and Stake SOL to earn income.
With an excellent one-stop user experience, Phantom has become the wallet of choice for users participating in Solana, with monthly active users exceeding 1.2 million. During the two-month period from August to October 2021, this number has increased by 5 times.
UI (User Interface), as a human-computer interaction window that realizes various functions required by users, determines whether a software or product can be intuitively operated by users.
Apple's iOS system has a strict system in terms of platform UI design specifications, from button to icon style, from image size to resolution, all require special customization. This not only makes the style of each program software tend to be unified, but also subtly makes users gradually get used to the way of using iOS software. Today, the rounded rectangular design, with only one button on the front and the rest completely covered by a glass panel, has become the iconic design of the iPhone.
Whether in the Internet, or the blockchain and encryption fields, UI design is what the project side needs to pay attention to. Even the "user-oriented" UI design will attract traffic to the product and make it more popular. Dr. Nielsen, an expert in the field of human-computer interaction, once pointed out: In the Internet field, usability is a prerequisite for survival. If the site is difficult to use, users will turn away immediately.
Some people say that when they buy tokens, they only look at the logo of the project. This is a joke, but it also shows the importance of the visual design of the project. Solana's logo at least tells me that this is a team that pays attention to details and has a good aesthetic.
The color of Solana Logo is a gradient from green to purple. Similar colors can also be seen in nature, such as aurora, which are mysterious and noble. In addition, many cyberpunk-themed sci-fi movies often use purple, green and blue in the screen. Reflects the future prospects of Solana's innovative blockchain technology development.
Many projects based on Solana seem to come from the same designer at first glance, and they all have a very consistent experience in terms of color matching, interface design, and interaction design. The interface is intuitive and concise, and the operation is convenient and fast. After users touch the software, they can see the corresponding functions on the interface at a glance, and they can use Solana system conveniently without too much training.
According to CGV FOF, on a well-known Solana IDO platform, when reviewing projects, the project UI performance will be given a higher evaluation priority. It seems that Solana is working from top to bottom to increase people's acceptance of Solana by incubating and supporting more projects with excellent UI.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, an isolated system has no energy exchange with the environment, and always spontaneously changes in the direction of increasing chaos (entropy), that is, the principle of entropy increase. In response to this phenomenon, Prigogine, the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, proposed that the system must be open when it transitions from a disordered state to an ordered structure, that is, the system must exchange matter and energy with the outside world.
The opening of the business ecosystem requires core enterprises to open resources and capabilities to partners, attract them to join the ecosystem, and achieve value co-creation through mutual empowerment.
Apple has attached great importance to external empowerment since its inception, providing external developers with powerful development kits and allowing them to connect users through the app store, thus giving birth to a large number of star apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, and WhatsApp. Compared with other platforms, Apple's release mechanism for developers' works is more fair and reasonable. The download ranking data on the software store is true and reliable, creating a good competition system and environment for developers, and developers can also understand users more accurately. real needs.
In terms of ecological construction, Solana has also devoted a lot of effort. For outstanding projects, Solana has a long-term funding plan, providing them with a full range of resource support including targeted funding, VC referral, technical support, recruitment support, marketing, and legal resources.
Take the hackathon as an example. In 2021, Solana officially holds three global hackathons within one year. In the recent hackathon, the bonus was as high as one million US dollars, the number of applicants exceeded 15,000, and developers from all over the world submitted more than 300 projects. A series of high-quality Solana native applications.
There is another statistic worthy of attention. 90-95% of hackathon developers expressed their willingness to continue long-term development on the Solana blockchain. These outstanding developers will continue to provide energy for the Solana ecosystem.
It may be radical to say that Apple founder Jobs changed the whole world, but it can definitely be said that Jobs is synonymous with the "innovative spirit" pursued by the United States and all mankind.
Jobs is a giant standing at the intersection of technology and humanities. His combination of idealism and perfectionism made Apple take a completely different route from traditional industries.
Take simplicity as an example. Jobs liked minimalism, and the Indian Buddhism he came into contact with in India "does not establish words, but directly points to people's hearts", all of which have a great influence on the design of Apple's "no button". In addition to pursuing simplification in product design, Jobs took the initiative to cut down many product lines; he may only launch 1-2 products each year, but they are guaranteed to be the best.
In my personal opinion, Jobs is to Apple what Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was to Solana. Of course, I have no intention of denying Solana's excellent team, which is as respected as the tens of thousands of excellent engineers and development teams behind Apple.
SBF's earliest professional background was as a trader, and he spent his early days at quantitative giant Jane Street. The Alameda Research (quantitative trading company) and FTX (centralized cryptocurrency exchange) teams he founded are full of financial personnel-quantitative analysts, engineers, and high-frequency traders. They are less concerned with the centralization/decentralization debate and more concerned with "Can this blockchain scale massively?"
After leaving Jane Street in 2017, SBF took the time to think about potential opportunities, and he found that: "Cryptocurrency has many characteristics, it can be a very inefficient system, and there is a large demand for liquidity, which is basically a huge sudden demand. emerge, and the growth will be very rapid." So, SBF began to look for the ultimate solution to these problems until he discovered Solana.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana, once described the scene of Solana’s first contact with SBF before the mainnet went live (2019): During the test, 80 transactions were processed within an average of 4.02 seconds. This result impressed SBF. After communicating with the team and realizing the huge development potential of Solana, it immediately decided to build Serum (decentralized derivatives exchange) on it.
In this way, Solana not only obtained a new application project, but also obtained an excellent encryption spokesperson (its importance now seems to be undoubtedly like James' status in the NBA). That is, from that day on, Solana officially entered the SBF moment.
In January 2021, SBF said on Twitter that everyone should sell SOL to him, and he would also buy as much SOL as possible for $3. Although this is obviously a joke, it shows that SBF has high hopes for SOL.
I still remember that iPhone fans lined up in front of the store all night to buy a new generation of iPhone. They hoped to be the first owners of the new iPhone, just like they hoped to get tickets to a superstar concert.
The iPhone launched by Apple every year is not only a new product, but also a new cultural phenomenon. This is a market effect that any other company's new product launch is unlikely to have.
Take Twitter fans as an example. According to CGV FOF statistics, as of now, Solana has 1.1 million fans. Although it is not as many as Ethereum (1.97 million), it ranks first among other mainstream public chain teams. Polkadot (1.01 million) ), Avalanche (450,000), Fantom (270,000), Near (230,000).
Let’s take a look at the fan token, Solana’s meme coin: Samoyedcoin ($SAMO). It was inspired by Dogecoin, Sam Bankman-Fried (with the letters S, A, M) and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko (whose hometown is the birthplace of Samoyed dogs). Today, SAMO has become the mascot and image ambassador of the Solana ecology. The highest market value of SAMO token circulation has exceeded 700 million US dollars.
In the Solana community, you can often feel a completely different atmosphere from all other public chain communities. We often see the "interaction" between ETH diehards and Solana diehards, which is completely different from the peaceful and happy feeling of the Near, Avalanche, Fantom communities and Ethereum communities. ) paid the "willful" price.
Of course, it may be far-fetched to compare Solana with Apple iOS from the above dimensions, and some people are still criticizing the recent instability of the Solana network, but in the long run, through network upgrades, service node expansion and incentive mechanisms These similar problems will become an episode in the historical development of Solana.
In fact, the development of Apple did not happen overnight, but was accompanied by the arrival of several important turning points, which established the status of Apple's king in the future.
For example, the iPhone 4 is an epoch-making product with concentrated breakthroughs in the hardware, software, and design of the iPhone: the first to commercialize the retina screen on mobile phones, the dual evolution of mobile phone camera hardware and algorithms, the most classic mobile phone shape, and the first use of self-developed chips...
In cosmology, the big bang created by the singularity constitutes the universe we are familiar with. The singularity is an important turning point in history. The birth of iPhone4 is a singular point in the history of Apple's development, allowing Apple to enter a rapid development channel.
I tried to list the realization of Solana's vision of becoming the Apple IOS in the encrypted world, and several singularities worth looking forward to:
——The number of C-end users exceeds 100 million. On November 7, 2021, the number of active users of Solana Wallet Phantom has exceeded 1 million. 1 million to 100 million seems to be a big leap, but the exponential effect of network development in the encrypted world will greatly speed up this process. On a more positive note, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has repeatedly said that with the technology up and running, Solana's goal for the next phase is to "attract a billion users." You know, the number of global VISA users exceeded 3 billion as early as 2018.
——The transaction volume of institutional users accounted for more than 80%. More institutional users joining the encryption market will drive more capital inflows. The bull market in 2021 is also known as the institutional bull, and many institutions have entered the market one after another, such as Tesla, Microstrategy, Grayscale Trust, and the ARK fund of the "female stock god" Mu Mujie, etc. SBF believes that the encryption field is likely to grow in the next five years, mainly driven by potential institutional investment. I personally judge that according to the Pareto law (80/20 rule), if institutional users become the main force in the Solana market, and if their transaction volume accounts for more than 80%, Solana will definitely usher in a new round of development.
——The migration rate of Ethereum projects to Solana exceeds one-third. In June of this year, Neon Labs, a cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Solana, was released. Neon allows anyone to run Ethereum smart contracts on the Solana blockchain, and developers can more easily build programs suitable for the two blockchains. It will be an exciting time if more than one-third of the projects that are already deployed and developed on Ethereum are building applications on Solana at the same time.
——The total market value of Solana reaches 50% of that of Ethereum. SBF believes that Solana's unique underlying technology for developing the DeFi protocol will also drive the price of its SOL token to soar. He even believes that Solana may surpass Ethereum to become the largest decentralized financial platform. Although the current market value of Solana (approximately US$55 billion) is nearly 8 times lower than that of Ethereum (approximately US$470 billion), if it reaches 50% of the market value of Ethereum, it will definitely be an important milestone in the development of Solana.
Will Solana Really Be the Apple iOS of the Crypto World?
I very much agree with Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, "We will see Solana and Ethereum co-exist. As everyone knows, you have to build an iPhone application and an Android application."
Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, Solana and Ethereum may become the iOS and Android of the encryption world, respectively. Fortunately, we are all witnessing and participating in this great change.
Attachment: reference materials
1. Solana Summer, Not Boring by Packy McCormick, 2021
Solana Summer, Not Boring by Packy McCormick, 2021
2. "An Introduction to Solana", Grayscale, 2021
An Introduction to Solana, Grayscale, 2021
3. "Why Solana is the 'World Computer' Blockchain Developers Need", Andrew Hyde, 2019
Why Solana is the "World Computer" Blockchain Developers Need, Andrew Hyde, 2019
4. "Digital Assets: Beauty Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder", Goldman, 2021
Digital Assets: Beauty Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder, Goldman, 2021
Note: This article is a CGV FOF research report, which does not constitute any investment advice and is for reference only. Original link: https://www.newsbtc.com/news/company/cgv-research-why-solana-may-become-the-ios-of-the-encrypted-world/
About CGV FOF: CGV FOF is a fund of funds from Asia, focusing on investing in Crypto Fund and Crypto Studio. CGV FOF is composed of family funds from Japan, South Korea, mainland China and Taiwan, headquartered in Japan, and also has branches in Singapore and Canada.
Disclaimer: Cointelegraph Chinese is a blockchain news information platform, and the information provided only represents the author's personal opinion, which has nothing to do with the position of the Cointelegraph Chinese platform, and does not constitute any investment and financial advice. Readers are requested to establish correct currency concepts and investment concepts, and earnestly raise risk awareness.
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