New Can Solana Shed Its Memecoin Image In 2026?
Solana’s bid to move beyond memecoins will depend on whether its upgrades can deliver predictable execution for serious onchain finance.
Solana heads into 2026 facing the question of whether infrastructure upgrades and tokenized financial activity can push the network beyond its memecoin reputation.
Solana kicked off 2025 at the height of the memecoin frenzy, with Solana (SOL) reaching a new all-time high of $293 on Jan. 19. As memecoin volumes cooled over the year, SOL had fallen to around $130 by mid-December.
“Solana needs to shake off the stamp of ‘memecoin [or] NFT’ chain and position itself as a serious place for Web2 and Web3 financial businesses to come and build the future of finance,” Tomas Fanta, principal at the crypto investment firm Heartcore, told Cointelegraph.
Whether Solana can move beyond that reputation will depend largely on the success of its infrastructure upgrades. Next year, Solana is expected to advance its Firedancer validator client adoption, which proposes consensus changes and execution-layer improvements that aim to make the network more predictable and resilient.
The layer-1 blockchain’s infrastructure push is already moving ahead. The Firedancer validator client is now running on mainnet.
Firedancer, developed by Jump Crypto, is a reimplementation of Solana’s validator software designed to improve performance. The client is capable of processing up to around 1 million transactions per second (TPS) under ideal conditions.
The Solana Foundation said on Dec. 12 that Firedancer has been producing blocks on mainnet for more than 100 days outside of test environments.
Two validators are currently running the full Firedancer client, but a hybrid version known as “Frankendancer” has seen far broader adoption. Data shows roughly 165 validators, representing about 26% of the total stake, are now running Frankendancer alongside the existing Agave client.
Doug Colkitt, a founding contributor to Fogo, a layer-1 blockchain currently running Frankendancer, told Cointelegraph that the bigger test will come as more stake shifts onto pure Firedancer because stability at a tiny share of the network does not guarantee stability at scale.
Source: CoinTelegraph
