Old ideas find new life on Solana

As Solana’s tech matures, some founders are starting new businesses based on old ideas that weren’t formerly feasible

article-image

Akif CUBUK/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share


This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


The Solana X mob was awakened after Avara CEO Stani Kulechov accused the Solana DeFi project Kamino of copying Aave’s tech — on top of having a “half-baked” UI, among other things. 

Kulechov’s remarks set off a round of snipes on Crypto Twitter, but while his Kamino criticism may have been overplayed, his sentiment did touch on a real trend outside of the borrow-lend world. As Solana’s tech matures, some founders are starting new businesses based on old ideas that weren’t formerly feasible.

The chain’s fundamentals — sub-cent transaction fees, thousands of transactions per second, and a year of uninterrupted uptime — have created an environment where concepts that once struggled on other blockchains might now thrive.

“Revisiting things that didn’t work a few years ago is sometimes more valuable than imagining new ones,” Inversion Capital founder Santiago Santos wrote on X this week. 

On a forthcoming episode of the Lightspeed podcast, I asked Santos to name some ideas that deserve a second crack. His answer: crypto gaming and options protocols. Perpetual futures are obviously a successful business, he added, but onchain DeFi options less so.

Another old idea that may be breaking through is social trading, which has been a recurring theme in crypto for years — especially in the form of copy trading. Tensor’s social memecoin trading app Vector is already lapping the annualized revenue from its Solana NFT marketplace.

A couple weeks ago, Tensor’s co-founder told me Vector would succeed where other apps haven’t because of its sleek Robinhood-esque packaging and the inherently social nature of memecoins — for which Solana seems to have an insatiable appetite. 

On the institutional side of things, look at Sol Strategies: Tasked with turning around a flagging crypto holding company, new CEO Leah Wald took an eerily similar approach to the one pioneered for bitcoin by Michael Saylor with Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). I’ve already predicted a few other MicroStrategy for Solana equivalents will come to market this year. 

Tech history shows that the winners aren’t necessarily the first movers but the best executors. Solana developers believe they’ve built the infrastructure for those second chances to succeed.

“The iPhone would be a perfect example as there were other attempts at smartphones before, but Apple came at the right time, right place,” Titan Exchange CEO Chris Chung said. “Hopefully Solana can provide the groundwork for some revolutionary ideas to take place as well.”


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Featured.png

Research

Helium stands at a pivotal moment in its evolution as a decentralized wireless network, balancing rapid growth, economic restructuring, and global expansion. With accelerated growth in domestic DAUs and Hotspots supporting its network, Helium is leveraging strategic partnerships and innovative proposals to scale internationally. The recent implementation of HIP 138, “Return to HNT,” has unified its token economy under HNT, simplifying participation and strengthening liquidity, while HIP 139’s phase-out of CBRS refocuses efforts on scalable Wi-Fi offload. Meanwhile, governance shifts under HIP 141 raise questions about centralization as Nova Labs consolidates control over the roadmap.

article-image

The DeFi Education Fund has ideas on how the crypto-friendly SEC can bring Commissioner Peirce’s vision to life

article-image

“Be prepared to do more with less,” Framework Ventures’ Michael Anderson said

article-image

Q1 may have been “frustrating,” but things are looking brighter for Q2

article-image

Tokens worth 20% of the current supply of the TRUMP memecoin launched by the president are set to be unlocked tomorrow

article-image

A crypto-industry lawsuit is “moot” now that Joint Resolution 25 has been signed into law

article-image

Fed Chair Powell assured markets that the labor market is in “good place,” dependent on price stability