Solana devs copy Ethereum playbook with SVM blockchains
Blessed with tacit endorsements of President Donald Trump’s crypto projects and capitalizing on its leading competitor’s in-fighting, Solana’s value and popularity has skyrocketed over the past month.
In the last 30 days, its market capitalization rallied $28 billion and its transaction priority fee 10X’d.
As a result of all of this blockchain activity, fees and congestion have started to bog down Solana’s user experience, encouraging the creation of Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) blockchains.
Attempting to buck its association with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allegations of unregistered SOL securities offerings, Solana is taking a leaf out of Ethereum’s playbook.
Years ago, Metamask (a popular Ethereum wallet) rolled out support for other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible networks. This provided users with a practical benefit, namely, effortless switching between various chains in the same wallet.
Quick, Metamask-like network switching in Phantom wallet
Via a simple drop-down menu atop their Metamask wallet, users easily switch between EVM chains like Avalanche, Polkadot, BNB Chain, and Tron. These blockchains and their multi-billion dollar native tokens — AVAX, DOT, BNB, and TRX, respectively — have EVM technology to thank for their founding success.
Behind the scenes, EVM sets standards for developers to ensure cross-blockchain compatibility for everyday users. Solana aims to bring this same interoperability via SVM blockchains and its increasingly popular, Metamask-like Phantom wallet.
Proceeds from Donald Trump’s crypto projects World Liberty Financial and his eponymous memecoin TRUMP have already purchased SOL and Solana-based assets like stablecoins.
Other memecoins like his wife’s coin MELANIA or the millions of Pump.fun memecoins have drawn mainstream attention to Solana.
Hundreds of thousands of users have onboarded to the blockchain via the Solana-friendly wallet provider Moonshot that Trump’s team used to launch TRUMP. Altogether, new users are creating demand for SVM blockchains as potential scaling solutions, such as Fogo and Solayer.
Read more: Solana wallet Phantom down due to ‘major incident’
Modularizing Solana with SVM
In short, Solana is modularizing. In Wei Dai’s view, this copycat strategy was foreseeable and is an obvious way for Solana to continue to grow as its users, transactions, and congestion increases.
According to a head researcher at Delphi, it wasn’t a particularly hard prediction to make and has benefited the price of SOL directly.
As SVM-compatible blockchains proliferate, users can expect to see more networks listed in Phantom wallet’s drop-down menu. They can also expect an inundation of pitches from issuers of SVM-compatible native tokens claiming a variety of value propositions in order to convince investors to buy new coin issuances.
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