The Metrics That Prove Solana’s Moat is Real with Multicoin’s Kyle Samani

After years of building through a brutal bear market and a near-fatal association with FTX, Solana is having a moment and potentially on the verge of becoming the next crypto to win SEC approval in the U.S. for a slew of ETFs.

According to early Solana investor and co-founder of Multicoin Capital Kyle Samani, the recent growth has not only cemented Solana as the next great crypto contender — it's put it on an inevitable path to flip Ethereum.

"For a long time, if you were in crypto, it seemed impossible for anyone to get there because Ethereum was so dominant," he tells Coinage. "The reality is that [the] Ethereum guys just totally missed the mark. They didn't scale, gas fees spiked through the roof, people got really pissed and they said, 'OK, these guys don't care about my user experience. I'm going to go elsewhere.' And Solana was really the primary beneficiary of that."

The numbers seem to reflect that. (Solana's price has outperformed Ethereum's by a margin of 10:1 since the start of 2023.) But, it's not even Solana's incredible 1,451% rally from the depths of the post-FTX crash crypto winter that seems most impactful for Samani, who seems just as bullish as he was when Multicoin led Solana's $20 million Series A in 2019.

"Solana is now the leading ecosystem by number of [new] developers," he says, pointing to Electric Capital's latest report. While Ethereum leads on every continent in terms of overall developers, Electric Capital reported this was the first time since 2016 new developers on another chain flipped Ethereum. "This was completely implausible two years ago, and today Solana is number one on that metric."

Of course, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer-2 has been working hard to counteract that trend. Base Lead Jesse Pollak recently joined Coinage to explain how Base has been able to leverage Coinbase's existing distribution to grow users and developers. That battle is likely to remain fierce as the size of the prize shifts from retail to institutions looking at options to bring assets, including potentially stocks and stablecoins, onchain.

Samani has become one of the loudest voices in the Solana community to take issue with Base being a centralized way to scale Ethereum, often repeating on X that "the future of Ethereum is Coinbase." Pollak has insisted that Base has plans to lean into decentralization in the future. (After hearing both sides, Coinage's decentralized membership crowned Solana as our Crypto Project of the Year in 2024 — and have explored both via our latest $PLYBTN memecoin experiment.)

But on the precipice of monumental change looming in Washington D.C., the size of the pie is set to grow incredibly quickly. As Coinbase makes its own push, other crypto exchanges, like Kraken, have pursued tokenized stock trading on Solana for non-U.S. users. And now, prediction markets for all kinds of things are giving rise to the idea that there can be bets instantly settled between any users anywhere in the world. Kalshi, for example, just raised another $185 million to cross a $2 billion valuation (Multicoin joined the round.)

“People are going to predict and bet on event contracts and event outcomes in every single country around the world. And I think the only path for someone like Kalshi to get there is on something like Solana," Samani said. But it doesn't even necessarily need to be that new markets come onchain. Maybe just boring old dollars would do just fine. With legislation like the GENIUS Act and new institutional on-ramps gaining momentum, Samani sees the potential for a tenfold increase in crypto's market cap in short order.

“To go from $3 trillion to $50 trillion over the next decade? Like, that's the kind of scale we're talking about,” he said.

With other DePIN projects, like mapping project HiveMapper and decentralized mobile provider Helium also scaling quickly, Samani says its Solana incubating the right ecosystem projects that will also continue to help it scale across more than just memecoins.

"I'm so grateful to the Solana community and the teams who have made it all happen, he said, reflecting on Solana's rise since the fall of FTX. "It was a really dark time ... and they they stuck it through. And now they're being rewarded for for that conviction."

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