Solana could turn bullish.

Solana has struggled under immense pressure from negative market sentiment. The would-be ‘Ethereum killer’ has dropped to position 18 by market value behind Shiba Inu, Uniswap, and Avalanche.

Solana is a highly scalable blockchain infrastructure designed to host decentralized applications. The blockchain is much faster and cheaper than Ethereum.

Users relate the blockchain’s current woes to the former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who is under trial for fraud and misappropriation of customer funds.

Vitalik Buterin shows Solana some love
According to Vitalik’s sources, Solana has an earnest, intelligent developer community. He said that since opportunists were out of the picture, the chain now had a great future. “Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the (Solana) community gets its fair chance to thrive,” shared Vitalik.The chain’s vibrant developer community has been one of its major strengths. The ecosystem boasts thousands of developers; according to its site, they have registered over 45,000 developers on its hackathons.

Reasons to be excited about 2023
Solana dApp store will accept its first applications in January, with the Saga phone expected to ship in early 2023.

Through 2022, Solana faced serious bugs that resulted in outages in the network. Developers are rolling out upgrades, such as QUIC, Stake-weighted QoS, and priority fee markets.

Another major upgrade will come from Firedancer, which will act as a second validator. A second validator means that if a bug took down one of the validators, the network would continue running on the second, increasing Solana’s reliability and resiliency.

There also talks of a novel token 22 standard that will enable the development of new applications, like collecting royalties on transfers and ownership and confidential payments.