- Solana is becoming a popular alternative to Ethereum because of its lower costs and faster speeds.
- Insider spoke with Mike Duboe, a VC at Greylock, about his picks for top projects on Solana.
- This article is part of "Master Your Crypto", a series from Insider helping investors improve their skills in and knowledge of cryptocurrency.
The Ethereum blockchain is the foundation for many popular crypto projects, such as Bored Apes Yacht Club and The Sandbox. But it has a couple of big drawbacks, some Web3 developers say: It's not built to process enormous numbers of transactions, and when there's heavy demand, the usage costs, known as gas fees, can skyrocket.
Other blockchains have been built to tackle this problem. Among the fastest-growing is Solana, which is designed to keep transaction costs low and speeds high. Though Solana has its downsides — it has had several outages in the past few months — its proponents say it is an important alternative to Ethereum for high-demand applications such as non-fungible tokens and gaming.
Mike Duboe, a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, has invested in the Solana-based companies Magic Eden and Portals. Insider asked him for his top picks for getting started on the blockchain.
Quotes have been condensed and slightly edited for clarity.
Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace
"At least one area I've been excited about over the last year or two has been NFTs. Digital collectibles are an easy concept to understand if you're not crypto-native. Obviously I'm biased on this, but part of the reason that I got so excited about Magic Eden is it has been a great entry point to a lot of people into Solana, given that these are lower-price, lower-cost NFTs. It's a super-friendly consumer experience."
Portals, a metaverse
"The term 'metaverse' is overused, but I think of Portals as a kind of digital space where people can hang out but also highlight what they've collected on Solana and elsewhere. Different brands can participate, and consumers can participate in this digital space. I think Portals has made the most immersive and accessible metaverse on Solana. Similar to if you look at The Sandbox or Decentraland on Ethereum, that's what Portals is doing."
Raydium, an investment platform
"The other entry point for a lot of people is around DeFi. With Terra's collapse, I think there's a rightful hesitancy to treat these yields as totally safe, but I think there are a number of people — and this is not me; I personally am less focused on this — who come into crypto just looking to earn better yields on different stablecoins or tokens. For something like that, you could look at some of the leading decentralized exchanges. Raydium is one of the bigger ones. There's also Mango Markets, Serum, and Saber."
Phantom, a crypto wallet
"Wallets are a necessary step if you want to do any of this other stuff. Phantom has the most share. There's another one called Glow that is starting to gain share. It's a very scary experience to start transacting on crypto and setting up your wallet, and I feel like the experience on Solana — it's become much more seamless and intuitive than a lot of the stuff I see on Ethereum."
"Some of that is just driven by speed. You don't have that period of time where you're just waiting for a transaction to go through, and hopefully you didn't screw something up. On Solana, things are much more immediate, which is what we're used to on the internet these days."
Solana Pay, a payments system
"I actually have to spend more time in this area, but Solana Pay is interesting. They're actually trying to integrate with traditional merchants to allow people to pay on Solana rails. So that's an exciting area where I think people are going to experience Solana without consciously knowing it at some point. I think that's an area worth keeping an eye on and looking into. They're working with Circle on some of this stuff. Checkout.com, which is an e-commerce product, is now accepting Solana payments."
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