• An investor skipped Solana in 2018, doubting its claims and team expertise, only to regret missing a 3,250x potential growth.
  • Solana’s network activity fluctuates, with transaction fees dropping to their lowest since 2024, reflecting shifting market trends and meme coin influence.

In early 2018, a venture capitalist named Haseeb Qureshi turned down the opportunity to participate in Solana’s seed funding round. Just $0.04 was the token price at the moment. Now the decision haunts him since, had he invested, his returns might have been as much as 3,250 times more.

To some, this may sound like a terrifying investment opportunity. Imagine rejecting a fantastic chance that turned out to be one of the biggest crypto assets today.

I passed on @solana 's seed round in early 2018 at $0.04.

At current prices, that's a 3,250x.

Solana was one of my first ever pitches as a junior VC, and back then I wrote memos for every deal I passed on (adorably naive and overconfident).

Re-reading this memo now is peak… https://t.co/1Pd6moQbRh pic.twitter.com/UAojvmkKAK

— Haseeb ＞|＜ (@hosseeb) March 17, 2025

Doubts About Proof-of-History and Scalability

Haseeb stated he was fascinated by the idea of Proof-of-History (PoH), a novel mechanism at the core of the Solana network, when he first read the Whitepaper. Still, the more he dug into the technicalities, the more questions emerged.

“They claim to be able to achieve 710,000 transactions per second. Google doesn’t even get 100,000 searches per second. This claim is overblown,” he wrote in an internal memo that year.

Furthermore, he thought the Solana whitepaper lacked sufficient information on the operation of its consensus system. He claims that although the project lacks clarity about how security and fault tolerance in distributed systems will be handled, it concentrates too much on technological optimizations such as GPU use and parallelization systems.

Concerns Over Solana’s Team Background

Apart from dubious technical assertions, Haseeb also questions the background of the Solana team. Most of the team members from Qualcomm have main expertise with operating systems, embedded systems, and GPU optimization. He feels, meanwhile, that knowledge of distributed systems and cryptography is lacking.

“This reminds me of other projects like Raiblocks/Nano, which are also worked on by low-level engineers but fail to understand the complexity of consensus in distributed systems,” he added.

Haseeb finds alarming the team’s history, which is more focused on hardware development than on blockchain systems and cryptography.

From Doubt to a Multi-Million Opportunity

Solana has shown throughout time that its strategy is successful. This network, with a fast-expanding ecosystem, is now one of the primary participants in the crypto space. For some who started believing from the beginning, the SOL token he once disregarded today makes hundreds of times the profit.

If he had only invested $1,000 in 2018, today it would be worth $3.25 million. But that’s just a number in his calculations, not a reality for him.

Solana’s Usage Fluctuates with Market Trends

On the other hand, CNF reports that Solana network transaction fees lately reached 53,800 SOL, the lowest amount since September 2024. This decline mirrors declining user involvement and network activity.

Driven by meme coin frenzy like Trump and MELANIA, the network reported up to 361,000 SOL in a week in January 2025. This shift in pattern indicates that Solana has been a technological success but its use varies based on market factors.

Lessons Acquired from Inaccurate Choices

Investing is a space where difficult decisions abound. Among them for Haseeb was turning away Solana. Although his decision was logical at the time given his analysis, history reveals that not everything can be exactly forecast.

Meanwhile, as of the writing time, SOL is trading at about $124.14, corrected 3.77% over the last 24 hours and down 35.87% over the last 30 days.

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