Meme Insider
The crypto Twitter timeline lit up this week after a candid post from David Phelps (cofounder of JokeRace) went viral at Devconnect. In a thread that quickly racked up hundreds of likes and quotes, Phelps revealed a pattern he kept hearing from founders: their biggest regret was choosing to build on Base.
Phelps didn’t hold back. He called out Base’s heavy focus on “content coins,” the lack of real distribution help for serious apps, and the fact that—despite all hype aside—Base still doesn’t have a true killer app that belongs exclusively to the chain. Polymarket went multichain (with most volume on Polygon), Pump.fun lives on Solana, Hyperliquid built its own chain, and even Kalshi spreads across multiple networks.
Then Vibhu dropped the reply that everyone is quoting:
Next time just build on Solana
What followed was a masterclass in why Solana keeps winning the deployment wars in 2025.
Vibhu listed live, shipping products that are actually finding product-market fit on Solana right now: MetaDAO, ORE, DFLOW, Racer, Meridian, Loopscale, Humidifi, Dupe, Carrot, Solstice, Soar, Helium, Hivemapper, Geodnet, xStocks—and that’s just off the top of his head.
The key difference, he argues, is there is no single gatekeeper on Solana. No central team deciding which apps get promoted. Instead, the ecosystem has organic wings for every niche:
- ICM investors
- memecoin launchers and traders
- futures maxis
- miners
- stablecoin yield farmers
- sophisticated DeFi traders
- DePIN degens
- stock traders
- neobank retail users
Each group has its own distribution channels, its own KOLs, its own culture. When a new app fits one of those verticals, the community pulls it in and rockets adoption—no permission required.
On Base, many builders reportedly moved tokens, liquidity, and entire products over because of promises of “Coinbase distribution.” When the promised users never showed up, activity kept falling. Sound familiar? It’s the same story we heard about Blast in 2024 and even parts of Solana in 2023.
But Solana in 2025 is different. Founders are quietly replatforming from Base (or waiting for exclusivity periods to expire) because real usage is happening here. The memecoin sector alone proves it—pump.fun, moonshot, rugcheck, photon, jup.ag, dexscreener—everything a memecoin trader needs lives natively on Solana and compounds daily.
Even the replies to Vibhu’s post turned into a celebration: projects announcing they’re building on Solana, users asking for recommendations, and the overall vibe of “told you so.”
The takeaway for anyone launching a token or app in 2025 is simple: if you want actual users instead of just mercenary capital, the path of least resistance right now is Solana. The network effects are compounding faster than any L2, the communities are deeper, and the distribution is decentralized but insanely effective.
Base will keep its advantages (Coinbase backing, stablecoin volume, on-chain builder grants), but the builder sentiment has clearly shifted. When the people actually shipping products start moving their code, the apps—and the memecoin meta—follow.
