Solana heads into 2026 going through the query of whether or not infrastructure upgrades and tokenized monetary exercise can push the community past its memecoin status.
Solana kicked off 2025 on the peak of the memecoin frenzy, with Solana (SOL) reaching a brand new all-time excessive of $293 on Jan. 19. As memecoin volumes cooled over the yr, SOL had fallen to round $130 by mid-December.
“Solana must shake off the stamp of ‘memecoin [or] NFT’ chain and place itself as a severe place for Web2 and Web3 monetary companies to return and construct the way forward for finance,” Tomas Fanta, principal on the crypto funding agency Heartcore, advised Cointelegraph.
Whether or not Solana can transfer past that status will rely largely on the success of its infrastructure upgrades. Subsequent yr, Solana is anticipated to advance its Firedancer validator shopper adoption, which proposes consensus adjustments and execution-layer enhancements that intention to make the community extra predictable and resilient.
Solana’s Firedancer is already dwell
The layer-1 blockchain’s infrastructure push is already transferring forward. The Firedancer validator shopper is now operating on mainnet.
Firedancer, developed by Bounce Crypto, is a reimplementation of Solana’s validator software program designed to enhance efficiency. The shopper is able to processing as much as round 1 million transactions per second (TPS) below best circumstances.
The Solana Basis mentioned on Dec. 12 that Firedancer has been producing blocks on mainnet for greater than 100 days exterior of take a look at environments.
Two validators are at present operating the complete Firedancer shopper, however a hybrid model often known as “Frankendancer” has seen far broader adoption. Information reveals roughly 165 validators, representing about 26% of the whole stake, at the moment are operating Frankendancer alongside the prevailing Agave shopper.
Doug Colkitt, a founding contributor to Fogo, a layer-1 blockchain at present operating Frankendancer, advised Cointelegraph that the larger take a look at will come as extra stake shifts onto pure Firedancer as a result of stability at a tiny share of the community doesn’t assure stability at scale.
“Numerous instances, a shopper may be steady while you take a look at it as a small p.c of the community, after which sure issues would possibly not likely emerge till you scale as much as a bigger p.c of the community.”
For builders engaged on latency-sensitive monetary merchandise, these adjustments to efficiency already matter.
“For merchandise like ours, the place milliseconds matter, I anticipate the Firedancer improve to make buying and selling even sooner,” mentioned Igor Stadnyk, co-founder and AI lead at True Buying and selling — a Solana-based AI buying and selling platform.
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Extra essential than uncooked efficiency is whether or not that efficiency may be relied on persistently, Stadnyk mentioned.
“Firedancer issues for a purpose that doesn’t get sufficient consideration: predictability. Throughput and latency enhancements are nice, however extra importantly, Solana will get a totally impartial shopper with a unique codebase, engineering tradition and failure modes.”
Alongside Firedancer, Solana builders are additionally getting ready for Alpenglow, a proposed overhaul of Solana’s consensus design. The improve would exchange proof-of-history and TowerBFT to chop block finality to roughly 150 milliseconds whereas bettering the community’s potential to remain dwell even when a portion of validators are unresponsive.
“If efficiently carried out, this new consensus mechanism will unlock Solana for the following stage of efficiency,” Fanta mentioned.
Memecoins don’t should be Solana’s unintended burden
Memecoins have been considered one of Solana’s high development engines, driving person exercise and cultural relevance within the final couple of years. That exercise helped pull builders and merchants onto the community and performed a serious function in Solana’s decentralized finance resurgence.
On the similar time, the dominance of memecoin buying and selling has formed how the community is perceived by traders and monetary establishments, typically tying Solana’s development to speculative cycles.
“Memecoins gained’t disappear. They’re a part of Solana’s cultural identification and a liquidity engine that brings customers in,” mentioned Stadnyk.
He added that the following part of development is more likely to come from purposes that rely much less on viral hypothesis and extra on constant execution, reminiscent of onchain perpetual futures and AI-native buying and selling brokers.
Memecoin buying and selling has additionally reshaped how liquidity is offered on Solana. Over the previous yr, the community has seen the rise of prop automated market makers (AMMs), the place buying and selling corporations deploy their very own capital and algorithms onchain fairly than counting on permissionless liquidity swimming pools.
“In 2025, prop AMMs most likely modified every part. Solana has at all times been a really trading-focused chain, and prop AMMs actually revolutionized the market construction there — at the least in spot buying and selling.”
Colkitt mentioned the mannequin got here with trade-offs, notably round centralization, however argued that it emerged as a direct response to demand.
“For those who didn’t have the memecoin explosion, you wouldn’t have had the explosion of exercise in Solana,” he mentioned. “You wouldn’t have constructed out the market construction or the infrastructure with out that quantity of transactions.”
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That very same buying and selling depth has additionally formed how Solana generates income. Because the community matures, the problem is decreasing memecoins’ affect on income and sentiment with out undermining the exercise that drove its latest development.
Fanta pointed to the significance of rising actual financial worth (REV) in methods which are much less depending on memecoin-induced maximal extractable worth (MEV). MEV is a type of income generated by transaction ordering, and it will probably dominate community income during times of intense speculative buying and selling.
“If Solana can proceed to develop its REV in a extra sustainable, much less memecoin-induced MEV method, institutional traders will take discover and reevaluate SOL’s worth proposition below a really totally different danger framework,” Fanta mentioned.
Fanta added that failing to draw extra severe monetary and company builders, notably as many Web2 corporations proceed to experiment on EVM-based networks, might restrict how far that reevaluation goes as Solana strikes into 2026.
Solana’s bull and bear case
As Solana heads into 2026, the community’s outlook more and more comes all the way down to execution. The bull case, as Fanta mentioned, rests on infrastructure upgrades delivering as supposed and new types of monetary exercise gaining actual traction.
Profitable rollouts of Firedancer and proposed consensus adjustments, mixed with development in tokenized funds, equities and different real-world belongings, might assist Solana generate extra sustainable REV and shift how institutional traders assess its danger profile.
Colkitt mentioned derivatives buying and selling in 2025 has been a missed alternative, with the community failing to supply a reputable onchain rival to Hyperliquid over the last cycle. The absence of such a platform displays Solana’s broader problem because it seems to maneuver past memecoins towards higher-stakes monetary markets.
The draw back dangers for Solana are that deep protocol adjustments enhance the hazard of chain halts, an consequence that will shortly revive criticism tied to Solana’s earlier outages and weigh on sentiment.
Fanta argued that failure to draw bigger Web2 and monetary corporations, a lot of which proceed to experiment on Ethereum Digital Machine-based networks, might cap Solana’s development even when its efficiency benefits persist.
For builders like Stadnyk, the result hinges on whether or not Solana can flip its technical benefits into one thing reliable.
“Solana is the primary surroundings the place that imaginative and prescient is definitely executable: low latency, predictable finality, low-cost state reads and tooling that now not feels experimental,” he mentioned, referring to real-time, automated buying and selling methods.
Stadnyk mentioned 2026 may very well be the yr Solana demonstrates that full-stack onchain buying and selling can function at a stage beforehand reserved for centralized exchanges.
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