Mert Mumtaz
Co-Founder & CEO of Helius, Solana RPC Infrastructure
Solana's faster finality should improve exchange and cross-chain UX and speed up app backends. Its biggest upgrade yet, Alpenglow, cut finality by about 95% in the attached chart, from roughly seven seconds to under one. Developers who avoided confirmed commits should see ingestion and indexing speed up by at least 90%; those apps could show users feedback sooner. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Solana has the strongest claim to become the capital of an internet economy as crypto adoption grows 100x across finance and commerce. That takes scale, and Solana is the most scalable chain, top two or three on every functional metric. SOL is the currency underneath: firms such as Citadel competing onchain must acquire it to bid for blockspace, and stakers earn fee and MEV yield. Buybacks give a floor, not a ceiling. The risk is the ecosystem slipping from the top two. x.com x.comÂ
Solana's Alpenglow cutover could make settlement fast enough for DEX trading, payments and tokenized assets. The mainnet upgrade targets finality falling from about 12.8 seconds toward 150 milliseconds, strengthening the base for those applications. Add for the finality improvement, not the upgrade-day candle; verify actual on-chain finality and validator stability before leaning on it. x.comÂ
Solana's 85-fold improvement in finality has yet to show up in SOL's price. Finality fell from 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds yesterday, while SOL slipped 2% and sits near $104 in the accumulation zone. Most won't notice until price does. x.comÂ
Pump.fun monetizes by selling SOL to buy PUMP, favoring PUMP over Solana's native token. Over the long term, the two should flip, primarily because SOL is expected to fall to $12. x.comÂ
Live Alpenglow speed and capacity help Solana lead Ethereum in usage and compete for financial activity. Measured slots are 211ms versus 12-second blocks (57x); theoretical basic-transfer capacity tops 65,000 TPS versus 238 (275x), and an initial finality reading is 202ms versus 12.8 minutes (3,800x). Solana has about 1,700 successful TPS versus Ethereum's 23 total TPS (75x). Spot and perp exchanges need that speed and capacity, which Solana combines with high decentralization. x.com x.comÂ
A $300 Solana thesis now feels more grounded. Per @gemtoast, Solana has $16B+ in stablecoins, $2.4B of daily DEX volume and the Alpenglow upgrade pushing toward ~150ms finality, taking the network beyond its meme-coin narrative; $300 in 2027 is a thesis, not a guarantee. x.comÂ
Pump.fun's continuing Solana sales add selling pressure ahead of a predicted move to $95 before the weekend. It sent another $14m of SOL to Kraken and has sold $875m since 2024 at an average of $160. x.comÂ
Solana is harder to fade because StonkFun's launchpad generated over $20 million in revenue in the last 30 days. SOL price action should follow. x.comÂ
Solana is now a much larger coin and has already had its big growth phase, so Bitcoin should recover first. Solana moves about 1.35x as much as Bitcoin, so a 1.5x Bitcoin move implies roughly $195-$200, not the $234 level at Bitcoin's $125K high. Solana should still reclaim its old high later this cycle. x.com x.comÂ
Solana has lost its moats: speed and retail mindshare carried it this cycle, and every narrative it was meant to own now has a stronger competitor. Memecoin attention is spreading to Robinhood, BNB and Base, Robinhood is coming for tokenized stocks, and Hyperliquid owns perps. Solana's perps did $8.9B last week, which Hyperliquid often does in a day. As more volume settles in its $15.5B of stablecoins, SOL matters less beyond gas. Pump.fun has sold about 4.8M SOL and expanded beyond Solana. … Show more
Solana keeps grinding higher because it is the fastest chain in the space, with real usage, real volume and builders shipping constantly while the rest of the market argues over narratives. The chart projects a 37% next move. x.comÂ
