Building Solana's Path to Ubiquity

Despite only running for a couple days, Solana’s Breakpoint brought the vibes.

The flagship conference hosted a storm of major Solana-related announcements that fueled a number of the chain’s top narratives, all while servicing the broader claim among Solana's community that the network remains the best chain for everyday use.

Let's dig into some of the top claims and see where Breakpoint's builders delivered on bolstering their narrative heft! 👇

"Solana is the best place for mobile."

Breakpoint highlighted Solana’s continued investment in mobile development, with hardware like the Seeker phone and a growing ecosystem of mobile apps, positioning it as the leader in crypto's inevitably mobile future.

Solana Unveils New Crypto Phone Seeker with 140K Presales on Bankless

Solana unveils new crypto smartphone Seeker with 140K presales. Features include Seed Vault Wallet, updated dApp Store, and exclusive rewards.

BanklessDavid C

Globally, ~60% of internet traffic now comes from smartphones, offering more accessible internet use. Interestingly enough, there is a strong overlap between the regions with the highest mobile traffic and the regions with the highest adoption of crypto. 

Standouts here include India, ranking as #1 on Chainalysis’ crypto adoption report, where ~70% of internet activity comes from mobile use, and Nigeria, which ranks at #2 on the Chainalysis crypto adoption report, where ~80% of its internet activity comes from mobile use. Overall, there's a strong regional overlap of crypto adoption among geographies where mobile penetration has led the way in bringing people, primarily centered around Africa and Asia.

With mobile wallet usage recently hitting all-time highs, these adoption and usage trends position Solana's mobile-first strategy, with the Saga and now with Seeker and also the JamboPhone2, a low-cost general Web3 smartphone, as crucial for tapping into high-growth markets, where mobile internet use dominates, and crypto adoption continues to surge, positioning it ahead of other chains, which lack the same strategic focus and progress. 

While the success of these phones can certainly be attributed in strong part to airdrop hunting, they nonetheless represent Solana’s investment in figuring out how crypto can best be integrated into a mobile environment. Besides new crypto phones, Breakpoint also introduced new mobile apps from leading dApps:

• Jupiter, the leading aggregator on Solana, teased their upcoming mobile app for the Apple App Store and Google Play with gasless transactions, one-tap swaps, zero fees, and support for Google & Apple Pay and credit cards enabled.
• DRiP, the popular creator platform, unveiled its mobile app in public beta on both iOS and Android.
• Photo Finish, a mobile horse racing game, launched on the App Store after its previous titles garnered over 15M downloads.

These developments demonstrate Solana remains the most prepared for mobile crypto adoption, positioning it as the most equipped blockchain to capitalize on the shift towards mobile-first internet use. 

"Solana is the best place for stablecoins."

Building on its stablecoin success, Breakpoint showcased Solana's efforts to prove its network over Ethereum and Tron.

PayPal’s Head of Crypto was among the loudest voices at Breakpoint, saying Ethereum was "not the best fit for payments" while highlighting Solana’s token extensions, a feature that allows adding additional capabilities to tokens, as a large reason why they expanded to Solana.

Solana’s stablecoin supply is still just a sliver of Ethereum's but has more than doubled in 2024 so far. Even as volume has dipped, Solana remains first in total stablecoin transfers, reinforcing its position as a top chain for stablecoins. 

With stablecoin use continuing to grow, builders at Breakpoint demonstrated the potential for even more emergent use cases. 

• Fuse Wallet announced a virtual Visa prepaid card that lets users spend stablecoins while keeping self-custody.
• Sling Money, a stablecoin payments service primarily serving Europe and Africa, announced support for USDC and Paxos USDP on Solana.
• Helio, a crypto payments provider, announced its support for Solana Blinks on Shopify, allowing people to sell goods directly on Twitter.
• Coins.ph, a Phillippines-based crypto company, announced that it would launch a Phillippines Peso stablecoin on Solana in Q4.

Beyond this, Sky (formerly MakerDAO) announced a proposal to integrate more natively with Solana, while Perena announced a multi-token stablecoin swap, demonstrating broad efforts to make Solana the home for stablecoin use.

"Solana is the best place to build apps for daily use."

A number of top Solana projects debuted new developer tooling geared towards enabling simpler user experiences that have the intricacies of crypto abstracted away into the background.

• Reown (formerly WalletConnect) launched its Solana Appkit, offering a comprehensive platform for developers to easily integrate Solana into their applications and equip them with features like simplified logins and fiat-to-crypto onramps while also boasting support for multiple coding languages.
• Phantom introduced its new embedded wallet feature, designed to simplify the onboarding process for new users to dApps by removing the need for seed phrases and external app downloads — meaning there would be no need to install a browser extension. Instead, users can create self-custodial accounts with just an email address and a four-digit PIN. 

• Squads Protocol, a popular multi-sig protocol, announced their v5 update, offering more control, flexibility, and security for developers. Key features include dynamic spending limits and expanded admin management, making wallets more like bank accounts with daily withdrawal limits or multi-factor authentication — expanding the possibility for wallet use by businesses or security fail-safes for users. 

Together, these announcements highlight the Solana community's interest in differentiating through everyday usability, focusing on expanding the developer toolkit so that dApps can improve user experience.

All in all, Breakpoint made it clear that the chain is not just a narrative hub, but a frontrunner for powering everyday crypto use. 

With continued progress in mobile development to match global adoption trends, stablecoin integration to support one of crypto’s most impactful use cases, and user-friendly developer tooling to provide application experiences superior to those in Web2, Solana proves to be rapidly improving its market positioning.

In a world where different blockchains support different types of use cases, Solana's builders are increasingly defining a clear path forward for the chain.