With 2024 upon us, Cointelegraph’s Hashing It Out podcast is focusing on narratives that are tipped to be at the heart of the crypto conversations this year. In episode 44, Larisa Barbu, the chief operating officer of Exchange Art — a fine art marketplace on Solana that recently integrated with Ethereum — breaks down Solana’s exponential growth in late 2023 and discusses its potential to continue in 2024.

Barbu explains how resilient the Solana ecosystem is and outlines the increase in activity on the layer-1 network beyond price action and speculation.

Barbu cites the Solana community’s resilience to survive the market downturn after the collapses of Terra and FTX in 2022. She says the belief in the vision emboldened developers to stick to the network and continue building.

Despite stating that most builders remained, Barbu admits that a chunk of users moved away from the layer-1 blockchain after issues emerged, which were compounded by the general cryptocurrency bear run. She explains that it took a constant focus on developers and major announcements about technical updates coming to Solana, such as Firedancer, to get people excited again.

She added that this could be part of the reason for the renewed interest and price growth since announcements were made at Solana’s Breakpoint conference in September 2023.

The episode also examines how Solana’s growth has affected other sectors besides decentralized finance. As the chief operating officer of one of Solana’s leading nonfungible token (NFT) marketplaces, Barbu mentions that Solana has seen an influx of new creators, such as photographers.

She also adds that more traditional art galleries are finding ways to integrate NFTs as part of their exhibitions, which could be bullish for the future of digital art.

Listen to the full episode of Hashing It Out on Spotify , Apple Podcasts or TuneIn . And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

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