While the blockchain saw its market capitalization jump by $28 billion over the past month, its transaction priority fees soared tenfold, echoing the early congestion struggles faced by Ethereum (ETH).

This mirror-like trajectory has prompted developers and researchers to draw parallels between Solana’s response today and Ethereum’s response years ago.

Wei Dai, a Research Partner at 1kxnetwork and PhD holder from UC San Diego, was among the first to raise this comparison. On November 21, 2024, Dai tweeted his “unpopular opinion,” noting that Solana was repeating Ethereum’s experiences: “Increase in fees signals a start to global congestion… Rise in min fees leads to exodus of apps and users.” Dai now says he has been vindicated. “As I predicted, Solana is following Eth’s footsteps: alt SVM L1s are popping up now!” he tweeted,

Source: Wei Dai on X

Solana’s Rapid Ascent and Congestion

A significant catalyst for Solana’s recent popularity spurt comes from the tacit endorsement of Trump-affiliated crypto projects. Memecoins like TRUMP and MELANIA, launched with assistance from Solana-friendly wallet providers such as Moonshot, drew masses of new users looking to capitalize on skyrocketing memecoin mania.

This influx, combined with ongoing attempts to steer public perception away from the blockchain’s historical association with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, resulted in heightened network activity. As fees climbed and block space grew scarce, developers sought an alternative that would offload some of the transaction load without compromising the user experience.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of Ethereum’s past. When Ethereum faced similar congestion issues, multiple Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchains like Avalanche, Polkadot, and BNB Chain emerged, offering compatible execution layers with separate consensus structures. Users could switch networks in their wallets via a simple drop-down, all while retaining the same tooling and programming language. Solana is now providing the same approach with SVM-based side networks—and wallet providers like Phantom are positioning themselves as the Metamask of the Solana ecosystem.

The Emergence of Fogo and Solayer

Fogo and Solayer represent the next frontier for SVM-based scaling solutions. Fogo promises “breakthrough performance in throughput, latency, and congestion management,” employing Firedancer optimizations and multi-local consensus to boost speeds. Meanwhile, Solayer introduces a hardware-accelerated SVM architecture called InfiniSVM, aiming to run at near-microsecond latency via RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) networking technology.

The authors of Solayer—Jason Li, Chaofan Shou, Qi Su, Chaz Cui, and Tony Ke—outline a plan to distribute the workload across specialized hardware clusters for tasks like transaction filtering, pre-execution simulation, and storage, all while maintaining a single atomic state.

By enabling users to switch seamlessly among these Solana-compatible chains, Phantom’s wallet mimics the user-friendly approach Ethereum wallets like Metamask once pioneered. Observers say this modular expansion is the logical next step for Solana as it tries to keep pace with surging demand while maintaining low fees and a fluid user experience.

Dai’s prediction that alternative SVM blockchains would appear seems to have come true, and, much like Ethereum before it, Solana stands to benefit from a diversified ecosystem where developers can build specialized chains while retaining cross-chain composability.