After Solana’s success, will there still be a competition among public chains?

‍Back to the last round of market, the Crypto market entered a bull market in 2021, and applications such as DeFi, NFT, and GameFi rose rapidly. At that time, Ethereum exposed its limitations due to problems such as transaction congestion and high handling fees. This provided a breakthrough for the new generation of public chains, which gave rise to a large number of public chain projects, such as Solana, BNB Chain, Polkadot, Avalanche, and FTM, which attempted to challenge Ethereum's dominance.

These emerging public chains not only compete with each other in consensus mechanisms, transaction speeds, and expansion plans, but also launched an incentive competition on how to attract developers, build communities, and gain capital favor, also known as the "public chain battle."

Although the advantages of each chain are constantly changing in the short term, this public chain battle has not only greatly promoted the progress of blockchain technology, but also made the entire Crypto ecosystem more diversified, and also planted the seeds for the rise of new public chains such as Aptos and Sui.

But now, four years after the outbreak of this public chain battle, it seems that people will never see this grand occasion again. In the past few years, only Solana has climbed up from the trough and has become another public chain leader. In addition, the various problems faced by Ethereum itself have even threatened Ethereum's position. Although there is still a gap of about 60% in market value, the market seems to have greater expectations for Solana.

What about other public chains? We can get an overall understanding through the market value comparison and current situation analysis of several popular public chains in the following table.

It can be seen that Solana and BNB are still strong in terms of market value, with basically no difference, but other public chains are still "working hard" to climb, including Ethereum.

In the past week, CZ began to frantically hint that BNB Chain will usher in various changes and innovations in 2025. He also tweeted for several consecutive days to promote it, and ushered in a small climax in the guessing contest of CZ's pet dog Broccoli, and is ready to challenge Solana's glory in the past year.

Of course, in addition to these old public chains, there are also emerging public chains like Sui and Bera that are trying to catch up. But it seems that for the current market, people’s expectations for public chains are no longer just faster and better performance requirements, but have gradually become whether they can experience truly applicable products. However, this road is really full of thorns. If there hadn’t been the MEME craze for more than a year, I wonder what Solana would have done?

After all, when it comes to products, no public chain has yet seen a fist-level application. To create innovative products that meet market demand (PMF) and can be sought after, except for stablecoins and individual DeFi applications, other directions are still lackluster. Even Agent, which has been popular for a while, has fallen into a new "death spiral".

Back to the present, for the operators of public chains, the current public chain competition is no longer limited to the moment of competing in marketing and rewards, but has become a real competition for product polishing. We can also say that MEME is a product form, but pure MEME is not a long-term solution. PVP on the chain will eventually get tired, and it will eventually return to users (communities) and the products themselves.

Therefore, looking back at the public chain competition in 2021, we may never go back to that summer. What we can hope for is a scene like the "Hundred Regiments War" of the Internet back then. In the end, we have to compete for users, operations, and landing. After all, L2 can also be regarded as a form of public chain, and the competition may be greater than we expected.

Finally, from an investment perspective, some of the selection logic of public chains is still applicable. For example, Solana is doing MEME, and other chains can also do it. SUI is doing games, and other chains can still do it. The market is still large enough. Where there is a wealth-creating effect, there are users. Only in this way can there be a probability of the birth of products with landing, because the market believes in the logic of price first and then product. This trend will not change for a while, after all, summer has not come yet.