Robinhood Built Something Solana Can't Compete With

Solana is often hailed as the fast, cheap chain.

But that's not what actually gave it lasting success.

Plenty of chains are fast and cheap now, so that's not enough.

What Solana had was something much harder to copy.

It became the place where the action was.

Meme coins were the product, and the chain was simply the venue they were played on.

Cheap enough that a bad trade costs you the trade and not the trade plus some crippling fees, fast enough that it actually felt like a proper app as opposed to tapping into a blockchain, and perhaps most importantly, permissionless.

Anyone could hop on and join the action.

Then launchpads made creating tokens effortless, liquidity venues gave them somewhere to trade, and routers tied it all together into one big market.

And on that note, here's an important point.

Liquidity and attention are not two separate resources.

Wherever the attention concentrates, the liquidity follows within hours.

And wherever the liquidity is deepest, the attention has nowhere better to go.

What Solana did so beautifully, it captured both at once.

And it did it by being the only major venue that never pretended speculation was something more respectable than speculation.

No talk of banking the unbanked, just a very fast, very cheap place to bet.

So then, who's equipped to attack a position like that? Well, Robinhood.