Revealing the Solana Foundation Marketing Memo: The Perfect Victory of Internet Capital and the F.A.T. Principle
Solana's commitment is to enable anyone with an internet connection to participate in the capital markets.
Original Title: Solana Fndn 2025 Marketing Memo
Author: akshaybd
Compiled by: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor’s Note: The current cycle has seen Solana perform exceptionally well, with intense meme trading on-chain and rising token prices, thanks to the Solana Foundation's focus on enhancing infrastructure performance and reducing latency to meet market demands, driving the growth of founders, applications, and tokenized projects.
Below is the original content (reorganized for better readability):
Internet Capital Markets and F.A.T. Protocol Engineering
Solana's commitment is to enable anyone with an internet connection to participate in capital markets. Today, you only need to download a wallet or app, click a few buttons, and you can join the internet capital market—a globally accessible ledger that can tokenize entities, currencies, and culture.
Why is this important?
It helps us create a world where anyone can own assets anytime and anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection. These assets can be global companies, real estate, commodities, or even cultural expressions. This lays the foundation for "universal foundational ownership." The competition among high-performance L1s is not just to establish a decentralized Nasdaq but to create an internet-native successor to Nasdaq—a capital market with better accessibility, lower latency, and shared global liquidity.
The opportunity is both simple and enormous: currently, only about 15% of the global population can participate in the U.S. capital markets—the most liquid market in the world. Many other countries' capital markets lack liquidity, have high entry costs, and inefficient settlement processes. The cryptocurrency market, on the other hand, is more accessible and liquid. At its peak, its trading volume even surpassed NASDAQ and NYSE, and we have the opportunity to build the best capital market on the internet.
In the future, companies will list directly "on the internet" and be able to reach over a billion investors holding private keys—voting with their funds to determine the future they want. This is not limited to stocks but includes all valuable asset classes, culture, and ideas.
How do we accelerate towards this future?
This is the significance of F.A.T. protocol engineering. In the past, the industry was largely built on the idea that "value would primarily concentrate at the infrastructure layer" (Fat Protocols, 2016). Eight years later, we are still building infrastructure because it often attracts higher valuations.
In contrast, Solana's ecosystem chooses to bet on products, as reflected in the 2024 Breakpoint conference. By focusing on founders, applications, and tokenization, Solana's market share in transaction fees—an excellent indicator of ecosystem activity and overall health—grew by 1,489% in 2024, reaching 12%.
F = Founders, Not Just Developers
Now, for a determined group of founders, it has never been easier or faster to go from a garage startup to a billion-dollar company with just an internet connection.
- tensor: Two founders from Canada, company valuation of $445 million.
- pump.fun: A UK team that achieved $155 million in fee revenue in 8 months.
- birdeye: Based in Vietnam, with 24 million users in 2024.
The startup flywheel will continue to spin rapidly in 2025. The Colosseum hackathon (Solana's hackathon) is the largest talent discovery and growth program in the crypto space, with past participants having raised a total of $650 million.
This flywheel benefits from ecosystem support designed for scalability: from the superteam hub, shipyard workspace, to the solanaturbine accelerator, community-led infrastructure further accelerates the growth of founders.
A = Applications, Not Just Infrastructure
Infrastructure represents uncertain optimism, while applications represent certain optimism. The Solana ecosystem prioritizes products that users truly need. What are the results?
Just in October of this year, application revenue reached $73 million, a 185-fold year-on-year increase, now leading all networks. Additionally, 74% of funds within the ecosystem flowed to applications (compared to 40% for Ethereum), as founders follow user demand.
Solana has always held the belief that what matters is not TVL, but the gathering place of economic activity. Chain GDP (revenue generated by applications) is the primary metric for measuring the long-term success of a protocol. When the revenue generated by applications exceeds that of the base layer, it indicates that the protocol layer has achieved product-market fit. If your infrastructure layer is exploitative, applications will leave, opting to build their own chains or migrate to others.
Study the Laffer Curve.
T = Tokenization, Not Just TVL
TVL is a passive, self-referential metric. Active metrics like capital efficiency and trading volume are more instructive. The more important ultimate goal is: Solana is the best platform for issuing internet assets. In the past six months, we have witnessed the issuance of 2.6 million tokens, accounting for 78% of the total across all chains. While memes may occupy a significant share of public consciousness, they are not the only things growing.
The treasury balance has doubled to $134 million, stablecoins have grown by 120% to about $4 billion, and there are also 4,200 physical assets from BAXUSco and dvinlabs, 190 million digital collectibles from drip haus, and over 1 million hotspots from helium—these are just a few examples.
With the follow-up of adoption, tools, and regulation, super tokenization will accelerate—this will become a globally accessible ledger where all assets will be tokenized.
Each component of F.A.T. is mutually reinforcing: more founders launch products, more products attract users, more users drive more capital to be tokenized, and more capital attracts more founders. In just the third quarter of 2024, Solana's native teams raised $178 million.
The "Protocol" Part of F.A.T. Protocol Engineering
Teams focused on core protocols (such as Anza, Jump, Jito, etc.) are working daily to enhance performance and optimize experiences. They push the limits of hardware and software to improve Solana's performance and capacity at the base layer. Increasing bandwidth and reducing latency are key strategies for Solana, emphasizing its ongoing commitment to building infrastructure for real-world use rather than purely for valuation.
Finally, I call it engineering (rather than theory) because it elucidates an important value inherent in the ecosystem. A product culture that is opinionated yet pragmatic, continuously making tough trade-offs, launching and iterating in the real world to find product-market fit (PMF). This culture attracts practitioners, not just academics.
As the ecosystem continues to grow, we should maintain this culture rather than become dogmatic or, worse, complacent due to any temporary successes. The development of cryptocurrency is rapid, and we will always remain adaptable.
Currently, the Foundation's marketing activities are expected to support these core pillars through various events and content—in the process, we celebrate the best founders, applications, and tokenized projects, while teams continue to work hard to enhance Solana's speed and performance. Additionally, given that the innovation renaissance seems to be unfolding in the U.S., we will also refocus on the U.S. market.
Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.
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