Solana's Celebration in Lisbon was a great success

Here are the highlights from a Solana-packed week in Portugal

Solana took over Lisbon, Portugal! The first Solana Breakpoint conference celebrated milestone after milestone over the last 12 months. Here’s are some highlights!

A celebration of Solana

Most people are forgiven for not knowing what Solana is. After all, even amid repeated recent all-time highs, the market cap of SOL ($72 billion) is just a fraction of more widely-known cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin ($1.2 trillion) or Ethereum ($550 billion).

With approximately 2,000 people attending the three-venue-wide conference, it was hard to avoid seeing Lisbon’s newfound crypto vibe, even if you were missing out on the headlines. 

It’s been a historic year for the Solana ecosystem, including NFTs on the network and the rise of Solana’s native token SOL, which started this year at the modest price of $1.52. Now it's at $240.

These milestones were the hot topic at Solana, as one friend told me, “Solana has changed my life, financially."

Last week, SOL was breaking new ground to reach its current all-time high of $260, just days before flipping Tether to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. 

Perhaps the biggest news of Solana’s week in Lisbon was a joint $100 million initiative announced in partnership with Reddit. The initiative was put in place to help develop “decentralized” social media technology. 

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Raj Gokal co-announced the fund on behalf of Reddit and Solana Ventures, respectively. At first, the founders said the fund would be $50 million in size, but moments later, Ohanian doubled the announcement to $100 million. 

NFTs now act as the cultural symbol of the crypto industry. It wasn’t easy to predict, but with the ever beneficial addition of retrospect, it has become obvious

Those aren’t just empty words coming from the Solana co-founder. Not only has a whopping $15 billion of total value been invested in DeFi projects built on Solana, but you can now also buy Solana NFTs on FTX’s regulated NFT marketplace. Coinbase and Kraken are also getting into NFTs.

It'll be fascinating to see where the Solana ecosystem sits at this time next year.