Solana Fantasy and Reality: From Supercycle Visions to House of Cards Troubles

Original title: SOL - The Emperor's New Clothes

Source: Flip Research

SOL - The Emperor's New Clothes

My timeline has been flooded with $SOL nonsense lately, mixed with memecoin excuse. I'm starting to believe that the memecoin super cycle is real and Solana will replace Ethereum as the main L1. But then I started digging into the data, and the results were alarming to say the least... In this article, I present my findings and why Solana may be a house of cards.

First let’s look at the bull market scenario, succinctly stated below:

Compared to ETH plus L2 s, there are four different ways to say it on the indicator:

1. High user base percentage

2 . Fees increase accordingly

3. DEX transaction volume is high

4, the proportion of stablecoin transaction volume has increased significantly

Comparison of user base:

The following is a comparison of the ETH mainnet and SOL (only compare the mainnet, because Dencun After that the vast majority of fees come from the mainnet, source: @tokenterminal ):

On the surface, SOL’s numbers look good, with over 1.3 million daily active users (DAU), compared to 376,300 for ETH . However, when we added the number of transactions into the mix, I noticed something strange. For example, on Friday, July 26, ETH’s transaction volume was 1.1 million, while DAU was 3.763 million, for an average transaction volume per user per day of approximately 2.92. However, SOL has a transaction volume of 282.2 million and DAU of 1.3 million, averaging a whopping 217 transactions per user per day. I think this is perhaps due to lower fees, the ability to trade more, compound positions more frequently, increased arbitrage bot activity, etc. So I compared it to another popular chain, Arbitrum. However, Arb only had 4.46 transactions/user on the same day. Looking at other chains got similar results:

Since the number of users is higher than ETH, I checked against Google Trends, which should be quite uncertain about the value per user:

ETH Either on par with SOL or ahead of SOL. Considering the DAU difference, coupled with all the hype surrounding the SOL memecoin trend, this is not what I expected. So what exactly happened?

DEX Trading Volume Analysis

To understand the trade count difference, it helps to look at Raydium’s LP. Even at first glance, it's obvious that something is wrong:

At first I thought this was just a fake transaction with low liquidity on the honeypot LP to lure out the weird memecoin degenerate, but looking at the chart, things are different. Much worse:

Every low liquidity pool is a project that has struggled in the last 24 hours. Taking MBGA as an example, in the past 24 hours, 46,000 transactions occurred on Raydium, with a volume of $10.8 million, 2,845 unique wallets buying and selling, and over $28,000 in fees. (Note that a similarly sized legitimate LP, $MEW, only generated 11.2K transactions) Looking at the wallets involved, the vast majority appear to be bots on the same network, with tens of thousands of transactions. They independently generate fake transaction volumes, the SOL number and the number of transactions are randomized until the project is completed and then move on to the next project. In the past 24 hours, there were over 50 carpets on Raydium Standard LP with over $2.5 million in trading volume, generating a total of over $200 million in trading volume and over $500,000 in fees. Orca and Meteora seem to have far fewer rugs, and I struggled to find any on Uniswap (ETH) with any meaningful trading volume. Apparently, there is a serious problem with Solana’s carpets, which has several effects:

· Considering the unusually high transaction to user ratio and the number of fake/fraudulent transactions on the chain, it seems that the vast majority of transactions are inorganic. The highest daily transaction to user ratio on major ETH L2 is 15.0x on Blast (fees are equally low and users are farming Blast S2). As a rough comparison, If we assume that the true SOL transaction to user ratio is similar to Blast, that means over 93% of transactions (and therefore fees) on Solana are inorganic .

· The only reason these scams exist is because it’s profitable to do so. Therefore, users lose an amount at least equal to the fees incurred + transaction costs, which can amount to millions of dollars per day.

· Once it becomes unprofitable to deploy these scams (i.e. when actual users get tired of losing money), you would expect most transaction volume and fee revenue to drop.

· So it looks like users, organic spend, and dex volume are all grossly overstated.

I'm not the only one who has come to these conclusions, @gphummer recently posted something similar:

MEV on Solana

MEV on Sol an a is in a unique position. Unlike Ethereum, it does not have a built-in mempool; instead, people like @jito_sol created (now deprecated) off-protocol infrastructure to emulate mempool functionality, allowing MEV opportunities such as front-running, mezzanine attacks, etc. . Helius Labs has put together an insightful article detailing MEV: https://www.helius.dev/blog/sol-an-mev-an-introduction The problem with Sol an a is that the vast majority of tokens traded are For memecoin, which is extremely volatile and has low liquidity, traders will often set trading slippage to >10% to ensure successful execution of the trade. This provides a profitable attack surface for MEV to capture value:

If we look at the profitability of the block space, it is clear that most of the value is now coming from MEV Tip:

While This is "real" value in the strictest sense, but MEV will only be implemented if it is profitable, i.e. as long as retail continues to imitate (and make a net loss on) the meme. Once memes start to cool down, MEV fee revenue also collapses. I see a lot of SOL papers talking about how infrastructure construction will eventually rotate, like $JUP, $UN, etc. This is very possible, but it's worth noting that they are less volatile, more liquid and simply don't offer the same MEV opportunities. Experienced players will be incentivized to build the best infrastructure to take advantage of this situation. During my digging, several sources mentioned rumors of these players investing in controlling mempool space and then selling access to third parties. But I can't confirm this information. However, there are some clear perverse motives involved - by directing as much meme coin activity as possible to SOL, it allows savvy individuals to continue to profit from MEV, insider trading of said memes, and SOL price appreciation.

Stablecoins

Speaking of stablecoin trading volume + TVL, there is another strange phenomenon. Trading volume is significantly higher than ETH, but when we look at @DefiLlama stablecoin data shows that ETH has a stable TVL of $80 billion, while SOL only has $3.2 billion. I think stablecoin (and more broadly) TVL is a harder metric to manipulate than volume/fees on low-fee platforms, which only shows how many skins are in the game. Stablecoin volume dynamics highlight this - @WazzCrypto notes the sudden drop in volumes after the CFTC announced an investigation into Jump:

Retail Value Extraction

Carpet and MEV aside, the outlook for retail remains bleak. Celebrities chose Solana as their chain of choice, but the results weren’t promising:

Andrew Tate’s DADDY was the top-performing celebrity token with a return of -73%. Things aren't much better at the other end of the boxing skill spectrum:

A quick search on X also reveals evidence of rampant insider trading and developer dumping on buyers:

でも、フリップしてください、私のタイムラインは、Solana で何百万もの取引ミームを作成している人々でいっぱいです。これはあなたの言っていることと何の関係がありますか？

X 上の KOL の投稿がより広範なユーザー ベースを代表しているとは単純に思いません。現在の熱狂の中で、彼らがポジションを獲得し、トークンを販売し、フォロワーから利益を得て、そのプロセスを繰り返すことは簡単でしょう。ここには確実に生存者バイアスが存在しており、勝者の声は敗者の声よりもはるかに大きく、現実に対する歪んだ見方を生み出しています。物事を大局的に考えると、詐欺師、開発者、インサイダー、MEV、KOLを含む個人投資家は毎日数百万ドルを失っているようですが、これは彼らがSolanaで取引するもののほとんどが単にそうではないということを考慮に入れてもいません。物質ミームによって支援されています。ほとんどのミームが最終的に $floor に落ち着くのは否定しがたい。

その他の注意点

市場は急速に変化しており、感情が変化すると、買い手がこれまで見て見ぬ​​ふりをしていた要因が明らかになります:

・チェーンの安定性が悪く、頻繁な中断

・取引失敗率が高い

・不可能選択したブラウザ

・は開発の敷居が高く、RustはSolidityに比べてはるかに使いにくい

・EVMと比較すると相互運用性が劣ります。私は、単一の (むしろ集中化された) チェーンに縛られるよりも、複数の相互運用可能なチェーンが私たちの注意を引くために競合する方がはるかに健全だと信じています。

· 規制の観点と需要の観点から、ETF が誕生する可能性は低いです。記事自体は、現在の状態ではソラナに対する機関投資家からの需要が低い理由を強調しています。 @malekanom は、従来の財務的観点 (@0xmert と同様) から関連すると思われるいくつかの点も強調しました:

· 排出量は 1 日あたり最大 67,000 SOL ($1240 万 USD)

· FTX 不動産の売却はまだ続く4,100万SOL（76億ドル）が閉じ込められている。このうち、750 万 (14 億ドル) が 2025 年 3 月にロック解除され、さらに 60 万 9,000 (1 億 1,300 万ドル) が 2028 年まで毎月ロック解除されます。ほとんどのコインの購入価格は、それぞれ約 64 ドルのようです

結論

いつものように、つるはしやシャベルを売っている人々はソラナのミームコインの流行から利益を得ていますが、投機家は知らず知らずのうちに一掃されつつあります。私の意見では、よく引用される SOL 指標は著しく誇張されています。さらに、オーガニックユーザーの大多数は、悪質な攻撃者によってオンチェーン資金を急速に失っています。現在、当社は熱狂的な段階にあり、小売業への流入がこれらの既存のプレーヤーからの流出を依然として上回っており、これは強気の見方です。ユーザーが継続的な損失で疲れ果てると、多くの指標はすぐに崩壊します。上で述べたように、SOL は市場センチメントが変化すると顕著になるいくつかの根本的な逆風にも直面しています。価格が上昇すると、インフレ圧力/ロック解除が増大します。結局のところ、私はSOLはファンダメンタルズ的な観点から過大評価されていると考えており、既存のセンチメントと勢いが短期的には価格を上昇させる可能性があるものの、長期的な見通しはより不確実です。

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