I continue to see misleading analysis about "Solana fees outpacing Ethereum"
Don't get me wrong. The Solana growth arc is impressive.
But if you look under the hood, it looks like a house of cards.
Case & point:
Over the last 30 days, 95% of Solana's total fees (base + priority) come from 1.26% of its wallet addresses (!)
Curious who's number 1? Wintermute. The rest are bots.
----
Look, I think Solana has a bright future.
But I can't help but imagine this conversation as more sophisticated market participants start looking at the network:
Wall Street: "Impressive growth this year. Fees are now outpacing Ethereum, huh? Tell me about the customer base."
Solana: "Well, 95% of our fees come from 1.26% of our users. We're working on diversifying that."
Wall Street: "Interesting. That's a high concentration. Why is it that such a small subset of users contribute to 95% of the fees?"
Solana: "Well, the trenches are real. A small subset of our users have found a way to profit off of other users (retail) trading mostly memecoins on our platform."
Wall Street: "What are these users doing to capture those profits?"
Solana: "Well, they sandwich attack other users. They also issue worthless coins, pump them on social media, and then trade against unknowing retail users."
Wall Street: "Is this legal? Also, you're telling me you basically have a few wolves driving 95% of onchain activity? And they are only able to do this because retail users are flocking to Solana right now to trade memecoins? What happens if retail becomes aware of this grift?
And what do your fee projections look like if this gets exposed?"
Solana: "Like we said, we are working on diversifying our customer base."
----
Again. Nothing against Solana. Massive comeback story. But my sense tells me another period of "chewing glass" is yet to come.
P.S. I'm sharing a high-level data-driven report across the L1 ecosystem in an effort to cover why I'm bearish right now.
If you'd like to have it hit your inbox when it's published, you can sign up below 👇
Data:
@the_defi_report,
@Dune