The “Ethereum Killer” Crypto Set to Skyrocket

Chuckie Sullivan.

I’m betting a lot of people will not know that name.

He is, to me, the most underrated, under-appreciated sidekick in cinematic history.

Right, El Jefe—but who the heck is Chuckie Sullivan?

If you’ve ever seen Good Will Hunting (truly one of the best movies of the last 40 years, and a fabulously written script), you will know Chuckie, a character played by Ben Affleck, as Will’s best friend.

And what makes him the most underrated, under-appreciated sidekick is this: Throughout the entire movie, Will is hellbent on throwing away his mathematical genius because he wants to stick around south Boston with all his blue-collar buddies and spend the rest of his life grunting out a bare-minimum existence. And Chuckie will have none of that. In one of the most pivotal scenes, he tells Will:

Every day I come pick you up, we go out, we have a few drinks, a few laughs, and it’s great. But you know what the best part of my day is? It’s for about 10 seconds—from the time I get to the curb to the time I get to your door. I think: Maybe I’ll get up there, and I’ll knock on the door, and you won’t be there. No goodbye. No see you later. No nothing. Just left. I don’t know much, but I know that.

Ultimately, that’s exactly what Will does as he leaves in the final scene, in pursuit of the love of his life, who has moved to California for school.

Now, I concede that recounting one of the best bits of dialogue from a secondary character in a movie from the ‘90s is a very strange way into a crypto story.

But to me, it makes perfect sense.

Because today’s dispatch is about an underrated, under-appreciated cryptocurrency.

I regularly write to you about bitcoin—and with great reason. The granddaddy of crypto is the most important digital asset you can own today. It’s digital gold that serves as a store of value that no government or person can manipulate. And it’s quite likely to emerge as an asset that governments peg their currencies to in some fashion to save Western fiat money from a debt-induced collapse.

Today’s dispatch is about… Solana.

I do mention Solana from time to time, and if you’ve been reading Field Notes for a while, you will know that I am deeply entwined in the Solana ecosystem. And yes, Solana is clearly not an unknown crypto. It’s one of the top five in the world, based on the value of all of its outstanding coins.

But underrated isn’t necessarily about being small. After all, Chuckie had a very significant role and a tremendous amount of on-screen time in Good Will Hunting. Underrated is about the masses not recognizing your significance.

That’s underrated… and that’s Solana.

Just recently, a Swiss crypto bank called Sygnum published a report noting that it thinks Solana is in position to “challenge” Ethereum’s role as the world’s #2 crypto. The reason: “Solana has emerged as a prime contender in payments and tokenization [turning real world assets like stocks, bonds, even bottles of rare whiskey into digital assets], with several traditional financial institutions referencing Solana’s strength in enabling fast and cheap transactions on-chain at scale.”

Let me rephrase this into English: Solana’s blockchain is so fast and so cheap to use that big-name firms are migrating onto Solana. Those names include PayPal, Visa, Shopify, and others.

At the moment, Solana is running about 3,000 transactions per second, but has recently seen that jump to nearly 100,000 as part of an effort by a Chicago tech company that has rebuilt the entire Solana technology. It’s running up to 1 million transactions per second in a development phase.

Some perspective: A firm like Visa can run the world of credit-card processing on about 1,700 transactions per second. And Ethereum, once considered the bellwether for crypto-based financial services, is barely mustering 17 to 20 transactions per second.

Here’s my bet—and to be clear, this is probably not a popular opinion: Solana will top Ethereum, currently the world’s #2 crypto.

That won’t happen this week or this year. Might take another five years. Who knows?

But it will happen.

Almost everything you and I do in life—investing, saving, banking, buying insurance, buying tickets to a movie, airline tickets, proving our identity, voting, pursuing various forms of entertainment and education, gambling, etc. etc.—all of that will be on the blockchain before this decade is over.

And that means transaction speed and transaction cost are going to be paramount. If a blockchain can’t beat Visa’s 1,700, then what’s the point?

But if a blockchain is consistently at a million transactions per second, the business world is going to race to your better mousetrap because businesses thrive on speed and low transaction cost to make their products and services work and to increase their profit margins.

That is never going to be a role that Ethereum fills.

And I feel safe in saying “never.” Ethereum has been trying to get to 100,000, but it keeps failing.

Solana is already approaching 100,000, and there’s already proof that 1 million is doable… because it’s being done on a test network.

All of this is why Solana—and a host of tokens tied to the Solana network—represent the largest portion of my crypto portfolio. It’s also why just this week I sent my Frontier Fortunes subscribers an issue that was focused entirely on the Solana blockchain.

I’m not saying Ethereum will go away. It has a significant role to play in crypto.

But it’s not a role that will be competitive with Solana.

As I’ve been saying on Twitter/X for about two years now, I am convinced that Solana is going to emerge as the most important transactional layer in crypto—the layer on which all of us conduct the bulk of our daily transactions, be those financial or educational or tied to entertainment and day-to-day consumerism.

And those who own Solana and hold on for the long-term are going to see the kind of wealth that accrued to the early adopters of Amazon, Google, and other companies that emerged as the most important names on the internet.

Solana is underrated now, just as Amazon was in the dot-com crash. But just think where Amazon is today. And think what that might mean to your portfolio if you have long-term exposure to crypto’s most underrated asset…