From theblock by Zack Abrams

Quick Take

"Blessed are the memecoin traders, for those who can overcome their spam will inherit the metaverse," Yakovenko joked on stage at the Emergence conference in Prague, during a discussion with The Block's head of research George Calle. In other words, "As with NFTs...we're blessed to solve a whole bunch of engineering problems with memecoins. It just makes the network and all the systems more robust."

Throughout the discussion, Yakovenko emphasized that Solana's developers are accustomed to "chewing glass" — in other words, tackling difficult problems to create a uniquely performant network. Yet following a well-documented series of outages in 2022, the network went down only once this past year, back in February, shortly after Pump.fun's January launch and roughly a year after its only outage in 2023.

So what changed about Solana's approach, especially with the heavy load memecoins have brought to the network?

"We were just lucky enough to ship fast enough to have those bugs behind us," Yakovenko said with a laugh. "The challenge with scaling performance with multi-core systems is you get into really multidimensional problems. You can have memory bandwidth bottlenecks that impact transaction throughput that impact network performance...one problem can have cascading effects down the line."

While some issues can be tackled in testing, Yakovenko argued that some of the issues Solana has faced couldn't have been anticipated and fixed beforehand using solutions like localized fee markets.

"These problems...I have never seen anyone predict them in research, let alone have solutions for them," Yakovenko said. "Shipping early and fast enough and having those stress tests helped us iterate and get better and better."

Yakovenko argued Solana's single state enables faster, cheaper, and simpler solutions than with other approaches, such as Layer 2 networks.

"Raydium did not expect that every memecoin is going to use their pools for launches, but nobody had to ask Raydium, 'Hey can we do this?' [and] nobody had to go and create additional bridges," Yakovenko said. "It just became easy, and that ease of use and lack of fees and friction creates a thriving ecosystem."

"Can this be replicated inside L2's and other systems that separate state in a well-defined way?" Yakovenko wondered aloud. "In theory it's possible, but developers are lazy and will take the path of least resistance."

As for the popularity of memecoins on Solana, Yakovenko described being surprised at first but less so in retrospect.

"In almost all digital economies, entertainment is the biggest place where money is made...when I start to think of it backwards, it's almost obvious in retrospect," Yakovenko said.