VP Matt Sorg on Solana’s scale and marketing issues

As the blockchain ecosystem expands, Solana aims to stay ahead of increasing demand through technical innovation and problem solving. Solana's ability to handle multiple transactions combined with other blockchains demonstrates its live performance. However, with growth comes the inevitable need to continually upgrade infrastructure.

In a recent exclusive interview with BeInCrypto, Solana Foundation Vice President of Technology Matt Sorg discussed a range of topics – from Solana's technical challenges and efforts to overcome transaction congestion to decentralization and network security.

What makes Solana an attractive ecosystem for startups and developers?

Solana is an ecosystem agent that collaborates with your application. Both of these things are very attractive to a beginner.

You don't have to spawn a whole new ecosystem and have wallets and on-ramp or off-ramps and USDC and USDT. You don't need to worry about this. That's it for you on Solana.

So it is very important for a beginner to focus on his core competencies. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Developing on Solana really starts people from there and they don't have to think about it. I think this is one of the reasons Solana's applications have been relatively successful. The apps focus not on the infrastructure but on the unique things they offer to the world.

What do you see as the key technical challenges developers face when trying to enter the Solana ecosystem?

First, it's the same thing with focus. I think there are a lot of chains and infrastructure there.

There's a joke that there are more chains than apps, which I think is true these days. A huge amount of different chains and L2s and whatever pops up. So, I think the lack of clarity makes it difficult to know where a founder is moving.

Solana is like a low-friction, high-performance chain, but everyone promises that. What we have is a live show. It's not just a promise like that.

Solana processes more transactions per day than all blockchains combined. It means both supply and demand. Both chains are direct and very low paying.

Solana is known for its high speed and low latency. What problems arise when trying to maintain these performance levels as the network scales?

We really pushed the needle on this. You can see we're pushing it hard, as many people saw in the early days, there were some hiccups.

The weight and duration of those are excessive, but any interruption is not good. That has definitely improved over time. If you're trying to extend the limit, that's the limit.

Many other chains are single series, too, by design. They have low throughput and little room for error. There are fewer things that stimulate things. It's a bit complicated.

But if you lock yourself into something like this, you'll only do 17 TPS. No other EVM chain operates more than 100, while Solana operates more than 8,000 in a live environment. And that's just from apps, excluding voice.

Can you explain how Solana proactively addresses bottlenecks as demand increases?

Every single time you 10x, you enter a new 10x need and a new infrastructure challenge. It's just the way things generally work.

One of our challenges is when that happens, it's usually just an engineering concern. The most recent was some series of jams that happened in April. It was hard to do transactions and things on the ground.

And there was all this FUD about failure transactions and all this noise. Failing transactions is not a big deal. The issue was actually already in the package.

The way we implemented QUIC was to stack web2 components. He was using a library called Quinn, which is an open source library from Google. We had to rewrite it.

Are there any tools or SDKs in the Solana ecosystem that developers should be excited about?

There's a lot going on. There is actually a very strong ecosystem. First, the chain itself has some assets that are basically an SDK to mint NFTs or mint tokens. You can use a variety of SPL tokens, Metaplex NFTs, or both to mine them.

As a developer, you're using on-chain code that's already been audited. All I do is enter my configuration, which can be javascript, game engine, python or rust.

But it's just standard front-end stuff. No need to re-audit to do this. If you need custom on-chain code, yes, you'll need to do SVM, Rust, and on-chain stuff, but most collaborative apps won't need to do that sort of thing.

Solana recently made headlines due to the rise of meme coins on the web. How will the foundation address this increase in demand?

It is a wild ecosystem. Legitimately, two of Solana's co-founders say anything on Twitter, and there's only one meme coin in it, like five seconds later or more meme coins that make fun of whatever they say.

I would say you can map it very closely to a lottery or casino. These are zero-sum games. At the end of the day, you have people competing against each other. You don't need the underlying infrastructure or development – just the narrative because you're trading in L2s.

I think the reason many L2s and L1s have struggled is that if they don't have users yet, why not just trade memcoins? If all you trade is narrative, go straight for the most fluid memes.

Cross-chain is becoming increasingly important. Does Solana have plans to develop relationships with other chains?

Solana himself is very integrated. All transactions are composed of several instructions. Those guidelines can be what we call various modern contracts or programs. The reason why Solana is so good is because of Jupiter; For example, when trading, it interacts with a number of different DX's to find the best prices at different times.

Solana is highly integrated and atomic, meaning all transactions either happen or nothing. So, it's a great user experience. Whether I want to do something, oh, it will, or it won't, by the way, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier.

That's where the failed transactions come from. Sometimes a business fails because one of the conditions is not met and that must fail. If that condition isn't met, it's like you described it.

It is not the chain itself that is actually running the failed transaction. Just because the condition is not met. And that's the first thing: Solana is already, at the core, about composability.

Another thing we're going to focus on is bridges. The idea that we've talked about a couple of times now is that Solana has this low friction and that's where the finances go. So it is very important to connect with places that offer properties as much as possible.

This is not that we are trying to replace any chain or anything, but if you have important assets on another chain and want to connect to the liquidity and functionality of Solana, we want to make it as easy as possible to reduce the speed. It flows into Solana, where there is another fluid and another function. So yes, tons of bridges are coming up.

This is called intents, which are basically cross-chain, implicitly defined objects you want. Often, there are many beautiful technologies such as ZK underneath to ensure that the idea is realized. We're working with some on-demand providers that do that.

What steps have been taken to facilitate decentralization and network security as Solana authenticators expand?

First, I want to make it clear that Solana's verifiers are unlicensed. You can log in and out as you please, and the protocol will be fine-tuned. This is very different from many L2s and other L1s.

Ethereum is also permissionless, but even that requires a minimum of 32 Ethereum. Solana is the lowest one. To be profitable, you need a lot more than that, but it's a license-free protocol.

There are many advances in security. The most popular FireDancer that you'll be hearing more about in the coming weeks is the second validator client on Solana, which gives validators more options in which client they want to run, as well as some additional functionality. So if there is an error in one, the validators can switch to the other. It is a powerful example of recovery.

What is Solana's long-term vision for decentralization and expansion?

Solana's goal is global synchronization of any data. Obviously, if you were thinking about global synchronization, it probably had some value – certainly financial data and also DePIN data.

We will explain exactly how it is used. It's a permissionless chain that we want to be able to facilitate finance and businesses. There is no hatred of any kind; We just want businesses to be set up for success.