Solana: who could have guessed?

Bitcoin is widely regarded as the original and the first truly decentralized digital money, whose creation sparked an entire industry now worth $3.9 trillion as of October 13, 2025. It remains the reference point for all digital assets, offering open financial rails worldwide and acting as the benchmark against which the rest of the crypto market is measured.

But Bitcoin was only the beginning. Beyond it lies a broader, more experimental universe of cryptoassets: projects that often behave less like currencies and more like early-stage technology ventures. Like start-ups, they can be volatile and unpredictable, but sometimes they deliver extraordinary growth and lasting adoption.

For investors, the question is no longer whether to look beyond Bitcoin, but where. Which networks and tokens are actually building something that lasts?

Beyond bitcoin, why look at altcoins?

In light of the above, this does not mean the rest of the digital asset universe should be ignored. For investors, the question is no longer whether to look beyond Bitcoin, but where. Which networks and tokens are actually building something that lasts?

One answer is Solana.

Solana and its native token, SOL, have become one of the clearest examples of both the promise and the peril of the digital asset class. In April 2020, SOL traded around $0.22. By November 2021, it had surged past $250 , a gain of more than 113,000% in just 588 days. Then came the crash: by January 2023, SOL had fallen nearly 97%, bottoming out near $10. For many, it was the end of the story: another speculative bubble deflating into irrelevance.

Yet less than 1,000 days later, SOL hovers once again around $200. What seemed finished has become one of crypto’s most unexpected comebacks.

The story of the comeback

Solana’s darkest moment came during the collapse of FTX in November 2022. The exchange, once one of the world’s largest, had deep ties to Solana through its trading firm Alameda Research and its decentralized exchange, Serum, which was built on the Solana blockchain. When FTX imploded, Solana was immediately branded an “FTX coin.”

Investors feared a flood of unlocked tokens would hit the market, and confidence evaporated almost overnight. The narrative was brutal: if FTX goes down, Solana goes with it.

But that’s not what happened. Despite the panic, Solana’s network never stopped running. Its security model held, its validators kept operating, and its core developers continued building. Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, later told CoinShares:

“A lot of people left Solana for dead, for dead, certain it was road kill, right? But what never really changed was no one left and everyone kept building.”

Market sentiment collapse

From its November 2021 peak to January 2023, SOL’s decline mirrored a collapse in sentiment across the crypto market. Projects with weaker communities or limited use cases vanished entirely. Many compared Solana to earlier “Ethereum killers” like EOS or NEAR, which never recovered from their crashes.

Inside the Solana community, morale was fragile. Developers questioned whether it was worth continuing, and investors exited in droves. But as Liu noted, the core builders stayed:

“At the all-time low, yes, emotions were different. But no one ever had the intent to leave. We just thought: it’s time to rebuild.”

It’s against that backdrop that Solana’s resurgence should be measured. The deeper the doubt, the more remarkable the recovery.

Solana’s trajectory could easily have ended in 2022. Projects that endure both reputational collapse and repeated technical failures rarely return and history is crowded with tokens that quietly disappeared after similar crises. Yet Solana’s story diverged. What looked like the end became a reset.

From 2023 onward, engineering fixes, a loyal community and new institutional partnerships created the conditions for revival. The ecosystem moved from survival mode to expansion, repositioning Solana as one of the industry’s most dynamic platforms. Once the stability issue was under control, Solana shifted focus to the applications that could prove Solana’s relevance. Unlike Bitcoin, whose primary use case is store of value, Solana positioned itself as infrastructure for user-facing products.

As Lily Liu states: 

“It was at the end of 2024 that we became the number one chain in terms of real economic value capture and then also number one application revenue and also the fastest growing developer ecosystem. Part of the Solana ethos from the very beginning has also been that the network is gonna continue to get better.”

From a December 2022 low near $8, Solana has appreciated more than 2,600% from its price bottom. Solana’s recovery has defied critics and forced investors to reckon with its resilience.

Few imagined that Solana, dismissed as yesterday’s story, would return as today’s one of platforms of choice for developers, investors and institutions.

The unexpected comeback

Solana’s turnaround began quietly in 2023. While public attention lingered on FTX’s bankruptcy, engineers focused on stability, fixing bugs, and strengthening performance. Once the network proved reliable, attention turned back to what mattered most: real-world use cases.

Unlike Bitcoin, which functions primarily as a store of value, Solana positioned itself as infrastructure for applications. It became the backbone for developers building products that ordinary people could use.

The rebuilding was visible across several fronts.

The moment Solana regained credibility came on September 5, 2023, when Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities to the Solana blockchain. This was not an experiment but a live integration. Visa began settling millions of dollars in USDC transactions directly over Solana and Ethereum, working with acquirers like Worldpay and Nuvei.

For consumers, nothing changed: a coffee purchased with a Visa card still cleared instantly. But behind the scenes, the payment rail was different. Instead of relying on expensive, slow wire transfers, Visa could now move funds at near-zero cost and 400-millisecond block times. Treasury operations were suddenly running at internet speed.

Symbolically, this moment mattered as much as the technology. Visa’s integration marked Solana’s graduation from an “experimental chain” to institutionally credible financial infrastructure.

Following this, Solana Pay gained momentum as a lightweight protocol for direct merchant payments. Cafés, online stores, and small retailers began experimenting with stablecoin acceptance: a quiet but significant step toward mainstream utility.

Solana’s comeback was as much cultural as it was technical. The network became home to memecoins, nternet-driven tokens that turned speculation into social engagement. With fast transactions and negligible fees, Solana provided the perfect environment for this new wave of experimentation.

Tokens like Bonk and platforms such as Pump.fun made it easy for anyone to launch new coins, helping grassroots communities form around playful assets. These tokens, though often humorous, became surprisingly powerful tools for engagement — fueling creativity, user onboarding, and liquidity.

By January 2025, Solana’s cultural reach hit a new peak when Donald Trump launched his $TRUMP token on the network, just days before his inauguration. The launch underscored Solana’s status as the platform of choice for viral tokens and high-visibility experiments.Even more importantly, institutional capital firmly arrived. BlackRock expanded its $2.9 billion BUIDL fund to Solana, while Franklin Templeton brought its FOBXX tokenized fund to the network. Together, these moves pushed Solana’s tokenized real-world asset market to a record $671 million, proving that the chain had matured from experimental to institutional-grade.

This wave of validation confirmed Solana’s place in global finance. What began as a high-speed blockchain for developers had evolved into a key component of the digital financial system, powering payments, markets, and real-world assets.

As Lily Liu noted in her CoinShares interview:

“We have the full spectrum, with at one end money market funds from some of our most respected institutions and then, at the other end of the spectrum is going to be memecoins that people have mixed opinions on.”

Bitcoin as anchor, altcoins for growth

Bitcoin remains the anchor of digital finance: decentralized, durable, and censorship-resistant. It continues to serve as digital gold, a hedge against monetary debasement, and the base layer of the crypto economy.

But beyond Bitcoin, networks like Solana highlight how the next phase of blockchain innovation is driven by utility rather than ideology. Stablecoins now move billions of dollars daily. DeFi platforms offer open liquidity. And Solana demonstrates that high-performance chains can support real users, real products, and real revenue.

For investors, the lesson is clear: the broader digital asset landscape functions more like venture capital: most projects fail, while a small handful achieve scale that reshapes the market. It is important not to equate altcoins with Bitcoin, but to recognize that selective exposure can capture outsized opportunities.