Something About Solana Just Feels Alive
Didn’t think I’d say this a year ago. But Solana’s been pulling me in lately — hard.
I’ve spent years around Ethereum. Built contracts, debugged gas nightmares, went through the forks, stayed loyal even when it barely moved. But somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like a dev-first chain. Foundation talks about rollups and protocol abstraction but the basics are still broken. Wallet UX still sucks. Onboarding is worse now than in 2019.
And Vitalik. Look I respect the guy. Genius no doubt. But he talks more than he ships. There’s always a new vision, a new paper, a new direction. Meanwhile real builders are stuck between Layer 2 bridges and broken RPCs.
Solana on the other hand. Fast. Cheap. Weirdly fun. Yes the tooling’s a bit different. Rust scared me at first. But after two weeks messing around with Anchor I realised this feels like Ethereum did in 2017 — messy, rough, but full of builders who actually want to ship things.
There’s no “wait for EIP-whatever” vibes. People just build. Update. Break things. Fix them. Repeat.
Last week I cloned a staking pool on Solana just to test what it feels like. It worked. Fast txs. No holding your breath waiting for confirmations. Just click and done. Felt like I time-travelled.
Might start shifting some of my side projects here. Not ditching Ethereum yet — still have friends building there — but for the first time in years I’m actually excited to code again.
Solana’s not perfect. But it moves. And I need that right now.