Solana founders see now as a time to bridge the blockchain and the physical world

After FTX collapsed, a number of crypto entities once tied to the bankrupt crypto exchange are trying to pick up the pieces and move forward. As for Solana — a prominent layer-1 blockchain that was backed by FTX and its outspoken founder, Sam Bankman-Fried — its co-founders see this downturn as an opportunity for its team and developers to build and ignore the noise.

“It’s just a time of immense fear, but there’s immense opportunity,” Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana, said to TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of signal and a lot of noise.”

Developers in the space who weathered the last crypto market cycle see Solana’s ability to handle high levels of transaction throughput as an advantage over some other blockchains and remain bullish on the underlying technology more generally, Gokal explained. “They’re not just paying attention to what’s happening in the market. What they’re excited about is what they can build, and they’re still building it.

“A lot of them feel the urgency to be ready with their products [for] the next cycle so when that next market cycle comes, there will be a lot of new users trying to experiment with products in crypto and we expect that to happen in the next year.”