How Solana Helps Streamline Mainstream Adoption
Since the cryptic inception of crypto and NFTs, the concept of mass adoption has been a hot topic, lightly frosted with questions builders can’t help but contemplate:
What drives growth? Is attention actually the new currency?
What will the world look like in ten years, and how can Web3 protocols address these needs?
If mainstream adoption is the metaphorical ‘north star’ of Web3, when will we find it? What will it look like?
While the idea of protocols catalyzing adoption through the development of apps in hopes of driving user expansion beyond a level we can comprehend is deeply rooted in fairytale levels of speculation; Web3 has proven time and time again that maybe this is a fairytale worth pursuing.
For many of us, that tale began with Solana.
Why Solana?
A website that keeps crashing. A streaming app with clunky UX. A car with an AC unit that keeps breaking in the summer no matter how many times the shop fixes it.
Friction hinders adoption - but it also puts us off to companies, technologies and applications due to the PTSD of our horrible experiences with them in the past.
Friction is a big deal, because friction is an experience. When friction is eliminated, so is frustration. When frustration is off the table, usage tends to increase.
In the case of Solana – the fastest, most scalable blockchain in the world – usage has increased a lot; making it the perfect home for NFTs.
The overall thesis is straightforward:
In the past, NFTs were the first point of contact for users interacting with blockchain by an overwhelming margin.
NFTs are tools developers can use to drive adoption, before their popularity surges (again).
Features of a Virtuous Ecosystem
Even for an ecosystem like Solana, mass adoption is no easy pursuit. However, it is attainable. The materials required for the journey to be a success can be broken down as follows:
Scalability
We’ve mentioned how Solana is the most scalable blockchain, but perhaps that doesn’t mean anything to you without perspective. So, to put Solana’s scalability into perspective, protocols like DRiP are minting millions of NFTs per week for as little as $1,000 per 1 million NFTs.
To put that into perspective, minting a 10k generative art collection on ETH would cost over $300,000.
Why can Solana stay so cheap? Partly because of the introduction of cNFTs. ‘C’ stands for compressed, and it allows anyone to mint an NFT at a fraction of the usual cost. While cNFTs are relatively new, they are constantly being improved and iterated upon, and are instrumental pieces in the grand puzzle of mainstream adoption.
UX
Remember what we said about friction earlier? Consumers want instant transactions in as few steps as possible. We know this much to be true; but how is it happening on Solana?
An example we can draw from are games. Gaming is a legitimate use-case for blockchain, and plays a vital role in Web3; especially on Solana.
In fact, games like Star Atlas are leveraging Solana to ship user experiences where consumers don’t even realize they're utilizing blockchain.
Phantom doubles down on user experience by allowing consumers to purchase and trade crypto within the wallet and seamlessly swap between chains – all while harboring some of the best branding in all of Web3.
The list goes on, and the further you go down the rabbit hole of excellence being built on chain, the more pleasantly surprising Solana’s UX becomes.
Experimentation
Thanks to low fees and killer UX, Solana enables experimentation at a level that few other chains allow, due to high friction or the protocol’s inability to inherently scale.
Solana’s low fees allows teams to try radical ideas.
For example: Programmable NFTs (pNFTs) by Metaplex enable creator royalties to be enforced on-chain, guaranteeing a legitimate revenue stream for creators.
pNFTs are crucial for the ecosystem. For ecosystems to thrive, creators need to get paid. Without creators there are no NFTs. Without NFTs, adoption is massively hindered.
xNFTs (Executable NFTs) by Backpack are another such example – an attempt to put executable applications directly on-chain – which again, is only possible on Solana.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Today NFTs are a niche community on a solitary corner of an emerging technology.
Tomorrow NFTs will transform businesses, industries and entire economies.
Tensor protocols, and the Tensor foundation will also power and enable that future. Stay tuned and subscribe for more details on how we will do that, and how you can get involved.