On 16 December 2022, a former Goldman Sachs executive explained why he is bullish on smart contracts platform Solana ($SOL).
Here is how Coinbase described Solana in a blog post published on 29 June 2022:
“Solana is a decentralized computing platform that uses SOL to pay for transactions. Solana aims to improve blockchain scalability by using a combination of proof of stake consensus and so-called proof of history. As a result, Solana claims to be able to support 50,000 transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization, and is one of the largest proof of stake blockchains by market cap.
“Solana aims to enable smart contracts to allow developers to build a wide range of decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, new crypto tokens, games, and more. When users stake their crypto, they make the underlying blockchain of that asset more secure and more efficient. And in exchange, they are rewarded with additional assets from the network, which are paid out as rewards.“
Prior to founding macro economic and investment strategy research service Global Macro Investor (GMI) in 2005, ex-Goldman executive Raoul Pal co-managed the GLG Global Macro Fund in London for global asset management firm GLG Partners (which is now called “Man GLG”). Before that, Pal worked at Goldman Sachs, where he co-managed the European hedge fund sales business in Equities and Equity Derivatives. Currently, he is the CEO of finance and business video channel Real Vision, which he co-founded in 2014.
According to a report by The Daily Hodl, on 16 December 2022, during Raoul’s Annual State of the Crypto Union Address, he had this to say about Solana:
“I’m really interested in Solana because I think the team is exceptional in what they’re doing. What they’re doing is building a consumer chain... Now, there are a lot of naysayers about it, it’s down 95%, it got caught out in the whole FTX thing, but I think it’s clean now because they all had to sell so now you’ve got this chain with retail adoption doing deals with Meta, Google, and all sorts of others.
“They’ve just done a deal with Discord as well and I expect more to come from them. I think they’ve really understood where their place is, having a store in Manhattan selling Solana merch is great and the mobile phone, who knows where that goes? But I think they’re unlocking something big.“
Last month, according to a report by The Daily Hodl, during an “Ask Me Anything” session streamed on YouTube channel “Real Vision Crypto”, Pal said the following about Solana:
“I really like Solana and I understand that the chain breaks. I also understand that they are fixing it. I also understand that’s a no-no. And one of the elements was, it was concentrated in its ownership because of FTX. They are now able to liquidate it and so you’re getting rid of one of the issues.
“Solana itself, I think it’s doing something very clever. In cryptocurrencies, what matters is narrative. Bitcoin narrative, digital gold for example. Ethereum, the distributed Internet for Web3. So where do these other chains fit in? Well, Solana has and is building a narrative, which is the consumer chain…
“But the consumer Internet, these are the people who’ve done the deal with META, doing deals with Google. They’ve got stores. They’ve got clothing lines. They have a consumer feel to them. And I believe consumer adoption, not at owning cryptocurrencies, but the use of NFTs [non-fungible tokens] and other digital assets is only going to explode over the next few years… Solana reminds me of Ethereum back in 2018 when it was down 97% and nobody cared. And that was a great bloody opportunity.“
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