Why This Early Solana Investor Is Still All In | Viktor Fischer
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: Why This Early Solana Investor Is Still All In | Viktor Fischer
This 68-minute episode features an in-depth conversation with Viktor Fischer, founder and CEO of Rockaway X, an early and highly successful venture fund focused on the Solana ecosystem. Fischer details the firm’s origin story, their unwavering conviction in Solana since the seed stage (when SOL was $0.04), and their current, aggressive thesis for the network’s future, including ambitious price targets.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is Solana’s technical viability, ecosystem development, and investment thesis, contrasted against Ethereum. Secondary themes include the changing landscape of crypto venture capital, the influx of Traditional Finance (TradFi) investors, and the macroeconomic environment (fiat debasement).
2. Key Technical Insights
- Ecosystem Dominance over Performance: Fischer argues that the “game is over” for new L1s because developer mindshare has consolidated around Solana and Base. The barrier to entry for a new L1 is no longer raw performance but the massive, multi-year effort required to secure exchange off-ramps, wallet support, and foundational DeFi primitives.
- Solana’s Speed as an Application Builder: Solana’s core technical advantage is its speed and low cost, which allows applications (like NFT minting tools) to be built and iterated upon extremely quickly, making it the preferred chain for rapid deployment.
- Operational Maturity: Following past network outages (like the mainnet snapshot issue), the community has implemented robust processes, such as avoiding mainnet upgrades, demonstrating a commitment to operational excellence and learning from mistakes.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- The End of 1000x L1 Bets: The VC math has changed; achieving a $1 billion Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) is now considered a success for a new L1 investment, shifting the focus from massive early-stage multipliers to securing significant ownership stakes (e.g., 10% of FDV) in successful protocols.
- TradFi Influx and the DAO Opportunity: Fischer identifies a major current opportunity in onboarding TradFi investors via Solana-based DAOs (e.g., Ford, STS, Solvade). He notes a massive gap: Solana DAOs have only $110M-$120M in daily trading volume compared to over $3B on Ethereum DAOs.
- Price Targets Anchored to Macro and Utility: Fischer projects SOL targets of $900 (matching ETH market cap), $2,000, and $6,000. The $2,000 target is based on Solana capturing 10% of the projected $20-25 trillion global tokenized asset market by 2030.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Rockaway X: Victor Fischer’s firm, an early investor in Solana, Camino, Squads, and Double Zero.
- Solana Team (Toly & Raj): Praised for their “never give up” attitude, which was crucial during lean times before the 2021 boom.
- Dr. Arthur Laffer: The inventor of the Laffer Curve, now a board member at Solvade, who bullishly views Solana as a “global NASDAQ” that offers instant, low-cost global settlement without overnight synchronization.
- WiseSolana.com: A resource Fischer created to simplify the Solana story for traditional investors.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion touched on the macroeconomic policy environment, specifically the expectation of negative real interest rates in the US (inflation running hotter than Fed rates). This environment, Fischer argues, forces investors to seek high-growth, yield-generating assets outside of traditional bonds and equities, benefiting crypto.
6. Future Implications
The industry is moving toward a duopoly of dominant L1s (Solana and Base) where ecosystem integration (wallets, exchanges) dictates success. The next major growth vector for Solana will be successfully integrating sophisticated TradFi capital through institutional-grade DAOs, positioning SOL not as “digital gold” but as a high-growth, yield-generating asset that improves traditional portfolio Sharpe ratios.
7. Target Audience
Crypto VCs, Solana Ecosystem Builders, Institutional Investors looking for high-growth digital assets, and Macro Strategists interested in how blockchain adoption intersects with global monetary policy.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"If we ideally, in my dreams, could also put centralized exchanges, matching engines here, like Binance, Hyperliquid, Bybit, everyone should collocate into this one data center with validators. Then arbitrage opportunities, you have microsecond latency. That would be amazing."
"You pay $12,000 in Frankfurt, $13,000 in New York, $12,000 in London, $50,000 in Tel Aviv, $240,000 a month in the UAE."
"If you look at FireDancer client, you can go on FireDancer.rockox.com. You can see our FireDancer client. We are running both Agave and FireDancer. So in the latest block, they were 225,000 transactions received. So any moment, even right now, 225,000 transactions are received by the leader. Of these 100,000, 180,000, sorry, of 220,000, 180,000, which is like 80% are duplicates. 80% of transactions are duplicates. It's massive."
"Solana TVL versus Ethereum? Like 10 times lower. 10 times lower. But you know, 5X is different price, so 2X is actually the difference in the amount of assets. I think DAOs will fix that gap next year."
"DAOs can just, they will be this channel for traditional finance capital into Solana applications."
"DAOs are an ideal vehicle for TradFi investors because they get exposure to the underlying asset, but also they get exposure to DeFi yield without all the complexity. And they can just subscribe to it by buying shares on Interactive Brokers. Super easy."