The State Of Solana: Market Position, Revolutionary Upgrades, and the Path Forward

Solana finds itself at a fascinating inflection point in the summer of 2025. Trading near $186-187 at the time of recording, the network's native token has recovered to levels not seen since right after the Trump inauguration and its associated memecoin mania. Yet this price action tells only part of the story. Behind the scenes, transformative upgrades like Jito's Block Auction Marketplace (BAM) are fundamentally reshaping Solana's transaction architecture, while debates rage about the network's competitive positioning against Ethereum and the emerging treasury company phenomenon.

In a comprehensive discussion on the Lightspeed podcast, host Jack Cuban sat down with Carlos Gonzalez Campo, analyst at Blockworks Research, to dissect the current state of Solana's ecosystem. Their conversation ranged from granular technical details about sandwich attack prevention to broader philosophical questions about what decentralization truly means in 2025. What emerged was a nuanced picture of a network that continues to push technological boundaries while navigating complex market dynamics.

Solana's Price Recovery and the Ethereum Question

Solana's climb back toward $190 represents more than just a routine market uptick. The recovery comes despite—or perhaps because of—a counterintuitive backdrop that has surprised even seasoned analysts. Carlos noted that the consensus view following the Pump ICO was that the newly launched platform would siphon liquidity away from SOL and other ecosystem tokens. The opposite occurred.

"You kind of saw the opposite of that where Sol has been almost only [up] since the pump ICO," Carlos explained. "In retrospect, it kind of makes sense. You kind of saw this pivotal moment in Sol's history where it outperformed centralistic changes during that moment and kind of signaled how good it has become from a fundamental perspective."

The recovery becomes even more interesting when examined through the lens of the SOL/ETH ratio, which has fallen below 0.05—its lowest point in roughly a year. This means Ethereum has essentially erased twelve months of Solana's relative gains in just three months. For those who spent too much time in the Solana-centric corners of crypto Twitter, this reversal might have come as a shock.

Jack offered a somewhat cynical explanation for Ethereum's resurgence: "A lot of the problems that we have outlined with ETH's value capture have been priced in and maybe Tom Lee going on MSNBC constantly has helped the asset as well in this weird treasury company world we live in."

The reference to the treasury company phenomenon is significant. A new meta has emerged in crypto markets where companies acquire treasury holdings of various cryptocurrencies and trade at premiums to their net asset value. This trend has benefited Ethereum particularly, with high-profile advocates like Tom Lee promoting the asset to traditional finance audiences through mainstream media appearances.

Can Ethereum Continue Its Outperformance?

The question of whether Ethereum can maintain its momentum against Solana involves parsing several interconnected arguments. Jack referenced a recent Delphi podcast where analyst Louis Harland made the case that on a five to ten year horizon, Solana might outperform or at least match Ethereum. However, on shorter timeframes, Harland was more bullish on ETH, arguing that while the growth of Layer 2s certainly diminishes Ethereum's value capture, this reality has been thoroughly priced into the asset.

Carlos acknowledged some validity in the Ethereum narrative, particularly regarding stablecoin activity. "Despite Solana's improvement in the past five years or so, it has still been very hard to attract stablecoin liquidity on chain. And despite some Solana DeFi apps being incredibly good in terms of security and UX, they still are a fraction of what Ethereum based applications on the DeFi side generate in terms of revenue and in terms of TVL and borrow activity."

The numbers are stark. Aave, Ethereum's dominant money market protocol, holds more than $50 billion in deposits—placing it among the top 20 banks in the United States by deposits if categorized as such. By contrast, Kamino, Solana's largest money market, holds approximately $4 billion. That's less than one-tenth of its Ethereum counterpart.

This disparity extends to where new financial products choose to launch. Carlos pointed out that yield-bearing stablecoins—a particularly interesting and growing segment—overwhelmingly launch on Ethereum first. "Ethena's USDe launched on Ethereum, Maker's or Sky's [stablecoin] is obviously launched on Ethereum, most of Maple's Syrup USDC supply is on Ethereum as well. When Ethena tried to expand to Solana, it saw basically no traction."

The Stablecoin Liquidity Debate

Jack pushed back on the notion that stablecoin liquidity should be considered a definitive metric of success. His argument hinged on what these stablecoins are actually being used for. "It's not like people are financing mortgages on Aave or whatever. There's not productive real world activity happening in either place."

This challenge cut to the heart of a recurring crypto narrative problem. Stablecoins are often pitched as serious, real-world-connected assets—some even categorize them as "real world assets." Yet the predominant use case on money markets remains recursive leverage strategies, where users loop native assets like ETH against themselves to amplify exposure rather than financing actual economic activity.

Carlos conceded the point partially: "The most popular use case in money markets today is probably just looping like the native assets. So you just loop ETH or Stake ETH against Stake ETH, but that's just what most people do. It doesn't mean you can't do the other things."

He pointed to emerging developments like Kamino's recent onboarding of XStocks—tokenized US equities—which has attracted over a million dollars in deposits. The fundamental capability to take out stablecoin-denominated loans and deploy that capital in the real world exists; the demand simply hasn't materialized at scale.

The historical data supports some skepticism about stablecoin market cap as a meaningful metric. Ethereum's stablecoin market cap passed $100 billion back in 2022 and currently sits around $130 billion. Much of that growth occurred years ago, with these stablecoins persisting through the bear market without much movement. Similarly, Solana's dramatic growth in USDC supply during June 2024 came not from increased productive activity but from the Trump memecoin being paired with USDC, prompting massive bridging onto the chain.

"I just think it's kind of an annoying bugaboo for me that Ethereum is seen as the major winner of the stablecoin meta," Jack said. "Solana is just as good for stablecoins as Ethereum and its layer twos, I would argue."

Carlos's counterpoint focused on the future: "I'm interested to see, once Plasma launches, which is kind of framed as this Tether-backed chain for real stablecoin activity, if activity moves significantly there."

Understanding REV: Solana's Fundamental Health Metric

Real Economic Value (REV), a metric pioneered by Blockworks Research, measures tips and fees paid to transact on a blockchain. It serves as a proxy for demand to access a network. The June 2025 numbers present a sobering reality check amidst the price optimism.

Solana finished June with $62 million in REV—one of only two months since February 2024 to dip that low, the other being September 2024 just before activity surged following Trump's election. While July appeared set to improve to $70-80 million, the broader trend is unmistakable: REV on Solana has declined significantly from recent highs.

Carlos offered a balanced assessment. "It's concerning in the sense that you had this narrative that SOL price was driven by REV and now REV's down. So how can you justify the price going up if you were solely valuing based on that?"

The explanation lies in memecoin activity—or the lack thereof. REV predominantly derives from trading activity, particularly highly contentious transactions where users have urgency to secure fast transaction inclusion. Most REV flows from trading-focused applications like Pump, Axiom, and Phantom. When memecoin activity declines, so does REV.

However, Carlos sees a structural shift on the horizon that will change how we interpret these metrics. The upcoming BAM upgrade will internalize some portion of the MEV (maximal extractable value) that previously flowed to Jito tips and the Jito block engine. "What I think will happen is that we'll see applications earning multiples more than validators and stakers. This is a trend you've already seen on chain, where if you look at the ratio between application revenue and REV, it has been up only—applications will continually earn more and more as a percentage of what validators and SOL stakers make."

Jito's BAM: A Revolutionary Upgrade for Solana

The Block Auction Marketplace represents what both hosts described as potentially "one of the most significant upgrades in Solana's history." At its core, BAM is a new transaction processing engine that utilizes an encrypted mempool inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This architecture enables block building that is both private and verifiable.

Carlos explained the implications: "Applications that were not previously possible on Solana are now possible by improving the microstructure and the design space via plugins. These are kind of like Uniswap's hooks architecture, but for block building—you can have custom sequencing of transactions on your applications via plugins."

The practical applications are significant. Consider perpetual exchanges, an area where Solana has struggled to compete with platforms like Hyperliquid. With BAM, a protocol like Drift could implement a plugin that prioritizes cancel orders for market makers. This removes a massive barrier that previously made on-chain order books impractical on Solana.

"Imagine Drift implements a plugin for prioritizing cancels for market makers," Carlos said. "You kind of remove this huge barrier that you previously had. And now perps are now possible on Solana, or order books are possible on chain. Also applications that require privacy such as dark pools are potentially now possible on the L1."

The flexibility is the key feature. Plugins allow developers to essentially build anything they want with transaction sequencing. This opens a competitive landscape for applications to experiment and discover which configurations deliver optimal results.

The Hyperliquid Challenge and SVM Chain Implications

Solana's struggles against Hyperliquid in the perpetual exchange space have been a persistent concern. Despite having established protocols like Drift and upcoming launches like Jupiter Bullet, none approach Hyperliquid's volume figures. If Solana aims to be competitive as a blockchain for traders, this competitive gap demands attention.

BAM potentially addresses this challenge directly. By allowing market makers to not "get picked off quite so often" through prioritized cancellations, liquidity providers can participate more confidently. This could fundamentally alter the competitive dynamics with specialized trading chains.

Perhaps equally significant is how BAM affects the emerging ecosystem of Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chains. Over recent months, several Solana-native teams have grown frustrated with L1 limitations and launched or announced SVM-based alternatives. The Ellipsis Labs team is building Atlas as an L2; the Data team launched Bullet as a network extension; Fogo recently went live on testnet.

"I'm really curious how this changes the outlook for these SVM chains," Carlos observed. "It seems to me that if now it is possible to actually do this on the L1, then these SVM chains lose their edge—their distribution and their differentiating factor, which was 'we're able to do this, which you can't from the L1.'"

Solving the Sandwich Attack Problem

Sandwich attacks have plagued Solana since at least early 2024, when Jito eliminated its mempool specifically because of excessive sandwiching. The attack pattern involves front-running and back-running trades to profit at the expense of unsophisticated users by manipulating price movements around their transactions.

Previous mitigation attempts involved identifying and blacklisting validators engaged in sandwiching—denying them delegation from Jito's stake pool and the Solana Foundation. But the fundamental limitation of this approach quickly became apparent: in crypto, anyone can spin up a new validator node under a different identity and resume sandwiching. It became a perpetual game of whack-a-mole.

BAM takes a more structural approach through its TEE architecture. The secure computing environment prevents BAM nodes from leaking transaction information. Users don't see what's going to be in a Jito bundle until transactions have already made it to the blockchain. This dramatically reduces the window of opportunity for sandwich attackers to identify and exploit vulnerable transactions.

The architecture includes an additional accountability mechanism. When BAM nodes schedule transactions and send them to validators, they sign an attestation that goes to the entire Solana network with the ordering of transactions. "If the validator that includes that block did not follow that ordering of transactions, then everyone is going to know that they committed potentially a sandwiching attack," Carlos explained. "You have this social pressure where if you behave badly as a validator, everyone's going to know about it."

Interestingly, sandwich attack revenue on Solana has already been declining through organic network improvements. As Max Resnick from Odds explained in a recent Lightspeed episode, increased network efficiency means less need to broadcast transactions widely. Fewer validators see each transaction on average, reducing opportunities for sandwich extraction. BAM accelerates this trend through deliberate architectural choices rather than relying solely on organic efficiency gains.

Doubling Block Space: Performance Versus Decentralization

Solana began 2025 with a 48 million compute unit block limit. A modest 4% increase to 50 million in April served as a cautious test. A more substantial 20% increase followed, pushing limits to 60 million CUs. Now, a proposal targets 100 million CUs, fulfilling Anza's commitment to double block space within the year.

The impact is already visible in network metrics. "If you see our chart on successful transactions on the Blockworks analytics page, you see that this week was an all-time high in successful transactions for the network," Carlos noted. "That speaks to the increasing block size limit and more people being able to put that on chain."

Larger blocks also improve network resilience during demand spikes. Events like the Trump memecoin launch or the Pump ICO generated explosive transaction volumes. Higher block limits enable the network to handle such demand without degradation.

Michael from Firedancer, appearing on a recent Lightspeed episode, offered an even more aggressive position: eliminate block limits entirely and let market dynamics determine how full blocks can be while still succeeding on the network. This push-the-limits philosophy aims to make Solana as performant as possible.

Jack raised the standard counterargument: doesn't this approach make hardware requirements prohibitively expensive, centralizing validation among only well-capitalized corporations?

Carlos offered a nuanced response that challenges traditional decentralization orthodoxy. "You have to ask yourself, is that really a bad thing? When it comes to centralization, you also have to think about what does decentralization mean? Maybe it just means being geographically distributed. And if you still are able to have this geographic distribution of validators, even if their requirements are really high, maybe that's good enough from a decentralization standpoint and the trade-off you get in terms of increasing performance is worth it."

Rethinking Validator Decentralization

The validator decentralization debate deserves deeper examination. Jack pointed out that Solana has never been accessible to truly casual participants in the way early Bitcoin was. Nobody is validating Solana on a laptop. Running a Solana validator already requires navigating third parties, finding server rack space, and managing significant technical overhead.

"I would probably have to go through some third party who's going to handle the whole technical side and find me some server racks in a data warehouse and do all of the necessary overhead and would probably take a fee," Jack said of his hypothetical validator operation. "It's not like things are so decentralized that truly anybody can be a validator today."

The Solana Foundation's delegation program has historically subsidized smaller validators that would otherwise be unprofitable. Many of these operations exist only because of this support rather than through organic economic sustainability.

Carlos was willing to make the trade-off explicit: "If you tell me Solana is going to be a hundred times more performant today but we have to cull 20% of the validators, yeah, let's do it. Why not?"

This pragmatic stance prioritizes the network's ultimate utility—creating internet capital markets accessible to anyone—over maintaining a validator set that includes hobbyist operators. If that vision requires validators to be run exclusively by professional operations like Coinbase, Galaxy, and other institutional players, the trade-off might be worthwhile.

Block Time Optimization and Alpenglow

Looking beyond block size, Carlos expressed particular excitement about reducing latency and eventually decreasing block times below 400 milliseconds. With Alpenglow, Solana's upcoming consensus upgrade, this becomes a realistic near-term target.

Block times already average below 400 milliseconds due to organic improvements. A phenomenon called the "slow validator problem"—where validators found it profitable to delay block packing to access more order flow—had been slowing the network. Social pressure and public shaming appear to have addressed the worst offenders.

Alpenglow promises more fundamental improvements. The upgrade will reduce time to finality by approximately 100x. Currently, Solana relies on optimistic confirmations, but Alpenglow introduces actual finalized confirmation across the network with dramatically reduced latency.

Critically, Alpenglow will also eliminate voting costs, which Carlos identified as the biggest barrier to officially reducing block times. "Imagine if you reduce block times—you're effectively doubling voting costs. That's a huge strain for smaller validators. If you kind of reduce that barrier, you open up the block space to reducing block times in the future."

The Treasury Company Phenomenon

The conversation turned to perhaps the most perplexing market trend of 2025: cryptocurrency treasury companies. These entities acquire large holdings of crypto assets and trade at premiums to their net asset value, creating an arbitrage opportunity that defies simple logic.

Jack's description of the phenomenon dripped with barely concealed contempt: "A nav play where for some reason the market values a hundred million of Solana being issued by a public company at more than a hundred million dollars and they'll pay for that premium."

The model has become the dominant meta for Wall Street types and liquid funds examining crypto opportunities. Random assets pump, followed days later by revelations of large pipe offerings or SPACs going public with crypto treasury strategies.

Carlos shared the skepticism. "This [is] just buying a bankrupt company and turning that into a treasury vehicle for holding SOL or ETH or whatever asset. I don't think SOL treasury companies are going to be as successful as Bitcoin or Ethereum treasury companies just based on market cap."

His enthusiasm lies elsewhere—specifically with staking ETFs. "The staking ETFs, especially if they go live later this year, have a lot more potential to attract institutional flows and actually create meaningful buying pressure for SOL the asset. It's just a much more attractive vehicle."

The fundamental logic of treasury companies remains elusive to Carlos: "I really don't understand why you would buy a vehicle instead of just holding the underlying asset or leveraging the underlying asset itself. It just doesn't make sense to me."

Solana's Positioning in the Treasury Company Era

Given that treasury companies have become a significant market force, how does Solana stack up as treasury company "material"? The answer reveals something potentially encouraging about the network's leadership philosophy.

Jack observed that the official Solana world has not aggressively pursued the treasury company meta. Discussions with insiders suggest recognition that while the trade doesn't logically make sense, it remains profitable—for now. "A trade can be wrong but still profitable over some time horizon."

The implicit warning is that when treasury company trades become unprofitable, they may become very unprofitable very quickly. At least one, if not multiple, of these entities will likely go to zero, harming shareholders. Solana's apparent restraint may reflect awareness that reputational risk matters when inevitable collapses occur.

"It's maybe encouraging to see that Solana is not quite so worried about competing in the treasury company meta," Jack concluded. The network's focus remains on internet capital markets, technical upgrades like BAM, and competing on fundamental infrastructure—less glamorous than treasury company announcements but potentially more durable.

DeFi Maturity and Protocol Valuations

Carlos's work on the BAM piece included analysis of Solana token valuations that revealed interesting dynamics. Using price-to-sales metrics based on 90-day trailing revenue, Pump was trading at approximately 3x—extraordinarily cheap relative to comparable protocols.

However, the apparent discount comes with significant caveats. "That is a backward-looking valuation in the sense that I'm looking at the revenue in the past 90 days. People are selling Pump because you have declining revenue and declining market share to Bunk. So on a forward-looking basis, you cannot just assume the revenue they made in the past is going to translate into one year forward looking."

Additional complications surround Pump's corporate structure. The billion-dollar fundraise created an equity-token dual structure that raises questions about which instrument actually captures future cash flows. Token holders may be buying into something where equity takes precedence in value accrual.

The Broader DeFi Competitive Landscape

The discussion touched on how Solana DeFi applications compare to Ethereum counterparts despite the disparity in metrics like TVL. Carlos emphasized that Solana applications have achieved excellence in security and user experience, even if they haven't matched Ethereum's raw scale.

Jupiter's lending app, launched in May 2025, represents ongoing efforts to develop competitive money market infrastructure. While uptake figures weren't discussed, the launch signals continued investment in filling Solana's DeFi gaps.

Kamino's position as Solana's largest money market with $4 billion in deposits shows meaningful scale, even if dwarfed by Aave. The integration of tokenized equities through XStocks suggests a path toward more productive, real-world-connected use cases that could differentiate Solana DeFi.

Traditional finance sees Ethereum's stablecoin and money market dominance and draws conclusions about where to focus attention. "Tradfi sees, okay, where are stablecoins launching? And they see Ethereum with 80+ percent of the market share. Where is money market activity taking place? They see Ethereum with the market share," Carlos explained.

Shifting this perception requires not just matching Ethereum's scale but demonstrating qualitatively different capabilities—faster settlement, better UX, and novel use cases enabled by Solana's unique architecture.

Network Health Indicators

Beyond price and REV, several network health metrics deserve attention. Successful transactions hit an all-time high in the week preceding the recording, directly attributable to expanded block limits. This represents concrete, measurable improvement in the network's capacity to serve users.

The block limit increases also improve Solana's ability to handle demand spikes without degradation. Previous high-profile events like memecoin launches stressed the network's capacity. Higher limits provide headroom for organic growth and unexpected viral moments.

Geographic distribution of validators remains a key decentralization metric even if total validator count decreases. The network can maintain censorship resistance through global distribution without requiring every interested party to run their own node.

The Staking ETF Opportunity

Carlos's strongest bullish case for Solana's institutional future centers on staking ETFs rather than treasury companies. If regulatory approval comes later in 2025, these products could attract substantial institutional flows while offering a more logical investment thesis than treasury company premium plays.

Staking ETFs would allow institutional investors to gain exposure to SOL's staking yield alongside price appreciation. This represents a fundamentally sound investment proposition that doesn't require buyers to pay arbitrary premiums to net asset value.

The timeline for potential staking ETF approval remains uncertain, but the infrastructure work continues. Success here could dramatically change Solana's institutional adoption trajectory.

Looking Forward: The Solana Roadmap

Carlos's monthly reports on Solana available through Blockworks Research provide ongoing tracking of network development. The July report promises coverage of BAM implementation details, block limit increases, and the signaling toward 100 million CU targets.

The coming months should reveal how BAM impacts application behavior and whether the predicted shift toward application revenue over validator revenue materializes. Plugin experimentation from launch partners like Drift will demonstrate what new use cases become possible.

Alpenglow's progress toward main net deployment represents another key milestone. The combination of reduced latency, eliminated voting costs, and dramatically faster finality could unlock another performance tier for the network.

Conclusion

Solana's current position reflects both significant achievements and ongoing challenges. Price recovery to inauguration-era levels suggests market confidence, even as the SOL/ETH ratio reminds observers that Ethereum remains a formidable competitor. The BAM upgrade promises to unlock use cases previously impossible on Solana while potentially obsoleting some SVM chain arguments for existence.

The network's focus on technical fundamentals—block limits, transaction architecture, latency reduction—may prove more durable than chasing treasury company trends. While this approach generates less immediate market buzz, it builds infrastructure capable of supporting the internet capital markets vision that Solana proponents articulate.

REV decline bears watching but should be contextualized within broader structural shifts in how value accrues across the stack. Applications earning larger shares of generated value may actually indicate ecosystem health rather than decay.

Most significantly, the upcoming months should demonstrate whether BAM delivers on its transformative promise. If perpetual exchanges can finally compete with Hyperliquid, if dark pools become feasible, if market makers gain confidence through prioritized cancellations—these developments would validate years of infrastructure investment and position Solana for the next phase of growth.

Facts + Figures

• SOL Price: Trading at approximately $186-187, the highest level since right after Trump's inauguration in late January 2025

• SOL/ETH Ratio: Fell below 0.05, essentially erasing a full year of Solana's gains against Ethereum in just three months

• Solana REV (June 2025): $62 million—one of only two months since February 2024 to dip that low, alongside September 2024

• Expected July REV: Projected to reach $70-80 million, showing month-over-month improvement

• Aave TVL: Over $50 billion in deposits, ranking among top 20 US banks by deposits

• Kamino TVL: Approximately $4 billion—less than one-tenth of Aave's deposits

• Ethereum Stablecoin Market Cap: Currently around $130 billion, having passed $100 billion back in 2022

• Block Limit Evolution: Started 2025 at 48 million CUs, increased 4% to 50 million in April, then 20% to 60 million, with 100 million CU target announced

• Pump Price-to-Sales: Trading at approximately 3x based on trailing 90-day revenue—extremely low relative to comparable protocols

• XStocks on Kamino: Over $1 million in tokenized US equities deposited on the Solana money market

• Successful Transactions: Hit all-time high in the week before recording, attributed to expanded block limits

• Alpenglow Impact: Expected to reduce time to finality by approximately 100x compared to current optimistic confirmations

• Pump Fundraise: Raised approximately $1 billion with an equity-token dual structure raising questions about token value accrual

• Block Times: Already averaging below 400 milliseconds; Alpenglow expected to enable further reductions

• Ethereum Stablecoin Dominance: Commands 80%+ market share of stablecoin issuance according to discussion

Questions Answered

What is Jito's BAM and why is it significant for Solana?

BAM (Block Auction Marketplace) is a new transaction processing engine that utilizes an encrypted mempool inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It enables block building that is both private and verifiable, offering applications the ability to customize transaction sequencing through plugins. This architecture makes previously impossible use cases—like competitive perpetual exchanges and dark pools—feasible on Solana's L1. The upgrade is considered one of the most significant in Solana's history because it fundamentally improves the network's microstructure and expands the design space for developers building trading and financial applications.

Why has Ethereum outperformed Solana recently despite fundamental concerns?

Ethereum has benefited from the treasury company narrative and high-profile advocates like Tom Lee promoting the asset through mainstream media appearances. While concerns about L2s cannibalizing Ethereum's value capture are valid, these issues have been thoroughly priced in by the market. The stablecoin narrative has particularly helped Ethereum, as traditional finance observers see Ethereum commanding 80%+ of stablecoin market share and dominant money market activity. Additionally, yield-bearing stablecoins have predominantly launched on Ethereum, reinforcing its position as the default chain for serious financial activity in many institutions' minds.

What does the decline in Solana's REV metric indicate?

The decline in REV primarily reflects reduced memecoin trading activity, which historically has been the dominant source of transaction fees and tips on Solana. REV mainly comes from highly contentious transactions where users urgently need fast confirmation—typical of trading activity on platforms like Pump, Axiom, and Phantom. However, this metric should be interpreted within the context of structural changes: the BAM upgrade will internalize MEV that previously went to Jito tips, and application revenue as a percentage of total value generated has been steadily increasing. The shift toward applications earning more relative to validators may actually indicate healthy ecosystem development.

How does BAM address Solana's sandwich attack problem?

BAM's TEE architecture prevents transaction information from leaking before inclusion on the blockchain, dramatically reducing the window for sandwich attacks. Additionally, when BAM nodes schedule transactions, they sign attestations that go to the entire network with the ordering of transactions. If a validator doesn't follow the specified ordering, everyone knows they potentially committed a sandwiching attack, creating social pressure for proper behavior. This architectural approach is more robust than previous whack-a-mole strategies of identifying and blacklisting bad actors, who could simply spin up new validator identities.

What are the trade-offs of increasing Solana's block limits?

Larger block limits enable more transactions per block, improving throughput and resilience during demand spikes. However, higher limits increase hardware requirements for validators, potentially centralizing validation among well-capitalized entities. The counterargument is that Solana has never been truly accessible to casual validators—running a node already requires significant technical overhead and expense. If geographic distribution of validators can be maintained even with higher requirements, and if the performance gains unlock significantly greater utility, the trade-off may be worthwhile. Carlos explicitly stated he would accept culling 20% of validators for 100x performance improvement.

Why might SOL treasury companies be less successful than Bitcoin or Ethereum treasury companies?

SOL treasury companies face disadvantages primarily due to market cap differences. The treasury company model works through generating premiums to net asset value, which tends to be more sustainable with larger, more liquid underlying assets. Carlos expressed skepticism about the entire treasury company phenomenon, noting that staking ETFs represent a more logical vehicle for institutional exposure to Solana. Staking ETFs would provide exposure to both price appreciation and staking yield without requiring buyers to pay arbitrary premiums—a fundamentally sounder investment proposition.

How might BAM affect the ecosystem of SVM chains being developed?

BAM could potentially undermine the value proposition of emerging SVM chains like Atlas, Bullet, and Fogo. These projects emerged partly because certain use cases—like high-performance perpetual exchanges with sophisticated order types—weren't feasible on Solana's L1. If BAM's plugin architecture enables these same capabilities on the L1, SVM chains lose their primary differentiating factor while facing distribution disadvantages against the established Solana network. This could redirect developer attention and resources back toward building on Solana itself rather than creating parallel networks.

Does stablecoin market cap actually matter as a metric?

Stablecoin market cap is often cited as evidence of network utility but deserves scrutiny. Much of Ethereum's stablecoin supply dates back to 2022 and has simply persisted rather than reflecting ongoing productive activity. Similarly, Solana's USDC growth in June 2024 resulted from the Trump memecoin launch rather than increased real-world utility. The predominant use case on money markets remains recursive leverage strategies rather than financing actual economic activity. However, the infrastructure does exist for productive uses—Kamino's tokenized equities integration demonstrates expanding real-world applications. The question is whether these productive uses will scale to match the narrative importance placed on stablecoin metrics.

What improvements beyond block size are expected for Solana?

Beyond block size increases, Solana is targeting latency reduction and block time decreases below 400 milliseconds. Alpenglow, the upcoming consensus upgrade, will reduce time to finality by approximately 100x while eliminating voting costs—currently the biggest barrier to officially reducing block times. Block times already average below 400 milliseconds due to organic improvements and social pressure on validators who were deliberately delaying blocks. The combination of these upgrades should deliver a significantly faster, more responsive network experience.

How should investors interpret Pump's apparently cheap valuation?

Pump's 3x price-to-sales ratio appears cheap but requires careful interpretation. This backward-looking metric uses trailing 90-day revenue, while markets are pricing in declining revenue and market share losses to competitors like Bunk. Additionally, Pump's billion-dollar fundraise created an equity-token dual structure that raises questions about whether equity or tokens capture future cash flows. Investors buying the token may find that equity holders have priority claim on the protocol's value. Forward-looking analysis rather than trailing multiples provides more relevant valuation context for declining market share situations.