Unveiling the Solana Foundation Marketing Memo: The Perfect Triumph of Internet Capital and the F.A.T. Principle
Solana's promise is to enable anyone with an internet connection to participate in the capital markets
Original Article Title: Solana Fndn 2025 Marketing Memo
Original Article Author: akshaybd
Original Article Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: In this cycle, Solana has shown strong performance, with intense on-chain meme trading and a continuous increase in token prices, thanks to the Solana Foundation's focus on improving infrastructure performance, reducing latency to meet market demand, and driving the growth of founders, applications, and tokenization projects.
Below is the original content (lightly edited for 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, all you need to do is download a wallet or app, click a few buttons, and you can join the internet capital markets — a globally accessible ledger that tokenizes entities, currencies, and culture.
Why is this important?
It helps us create a world where anyone with an internet connection can have assets anytime, anywhere. These assets can be global companies, real estate, commodities, or even cultural expressions. This lays the foundation for "universal ownership." The competition for high-performance L1 is not just to establish a decentralized Nasdaq but also to create a successor to the internet-native 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 US capital markets — the most liquid market globally. Many other countries' capital markets lack liquidity, have high entry costs, and inefficient settlement. The cryptocurrency market is more accessible and liquid. At its peak, its trading volume even surpasses the NASDAQ and NYSE, giving us the opportunity to build the best capital market on the internet.
In the future, companies will list directly "on the internet" and will be able to reach over a billion investors holding private keys — using their funds to vote on the future they desire. This includes not just stocks but all valuable asset classes, culture, and ideas.
How to Accelerate the Journey to This Future?
This is the essence of the F.A.T. Protocol engineering, as the industry has mostly been built on the idea of "value will mainly reside 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 chose to bet on products, a point that was highlighted at the 2024 Breakpoint conference. By focusing on founders, applications, and tokenization, Solana's share of the transaction fee market — a great metric for ecosystem activity and overall health — grew by 1,489% in 2024, reaching 12%.
F = Founder, Not Just Developer
Now, for a determined group of founders, it has never been simpler and faster to go from garage startup to a billion-dollar company with just an internet connection.
1. tensor: Two founders from Canada with a company valuation of $4.45 billion
2. pump.fun: A UK team that achieved $155 million in fee revenue in 8 months
3. birdeye: Headquartered in Vietnam, reaching 24 million users in 2024
The startup flywheel will continue to spin fast in 2025; the colosseum hackathon (Solana's hackathon) is the crypto world's largest talent discovery and talent development program, with past participants collectively raising $6.5 billion.
This flywheel benefits from ecosystem support tailored for scale: from the hub of the superteam, the workspace of the shipyard, to the solanaturbine accelerator, community-led infrastructure further accelerates founders' growth rate.
A = Application, Not Just Infrastructure
Infrastructure represents uncertain optimism, while applications represent certain optimism. The Solana ecosystem prioritizes products that users truly need, and the result?
Just in October of this year, app revenue reached $73 million, a 185x increase year over year, now leading all networks. Additionally, 74% of the ecosystem's funds flow to apps (in contrast, Ethereum is at 40%) as founders follow user demand.
Solana has always held this belief: it's not TVL that matters, but rather the hub of economic activity. Chain GDP (revenue generated by apps) is the key metric to measure the long-term success of a protocol. When app revenue surpasses the base layer, it signifies that the protocol layer has achieved product-market fit. If your infrastructure layer is rent-seeking, apps will leave to build their own chain or migrate to other chains.
Study the Laffer Curve.
T = Tokenization, Not Just TVL
TVL is a passive, self-referential metric. Active metrics like capital efficiency, transaction volume, etc., are more instructive. The ultimate goal is: Solana is the best platform for securitizing internet assets. In the last six months, we've seen the launch of 2.6 million tokens, representing 78% of the total chain count. While Memes may have occupied a larger share of public consciousness, they are not the only thing on the rise.
The Treasury balance has doubled, reaching $134 million, stablecoins have grown by 120% to around $4 billion, including 4.2k physical assets from BAXUSco and dvinlabs, 190 million digital collectibles from drip haus, and over 1 million hotspots from helium, to name a few.
With adoption, tools, and regulatory follow-through, hyper-tokenization will accelerate – becoming a globally accessible ledger where all assets are tokenized.
Every component of F.A.T. fuels each other: more founders launch products, more products attract users, more users drive more capital's tokenization, more capital attracts more founders. Just in Q3 2024, the Solana native team raised $178 million.
The "Protocol" Part in F.A.T. Protocol Engineering
The teams focusing on the core protocol (such as Anza, Jump, Jito, etc.) work tirelessly every day to improve performance and enhance the user experience. By pushing the limits of hardware and software, they aim to enhance Solana's performance and capacity at the foundational level. Increasing bandwidth and reducing latency are key strategies for Solana, highlighting its continuous commitment to real-world infrastructure development rather than solely focusing on valuation.
Lastly, I refer to it as engineering (rather than theory) because it elucidates a key inherent value in the ecosystem. A product culture that is opinionated yet pragmatic, continually 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 sustain this culture rather than becoming dogmatic or, worse, complacent due to any temporary success. Cryptocurrency evolves rapidly, and we will always remain agile.
Currently, it is anticipated that the Foundation's marketing efforts will support these core tenets through various events and content—celebrating top founders, applications, and tokenization projects while teams continue to push the speed and performance of Solana. Additionally, with what seems to be an innovation renaissance unfolding in the United States, 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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