Solana

Competitive environment:
Today there are many projects in the crypto industry that are aimed to solve speed and scaling solutions of Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. For example, QuarkChain, PChain, Credits, Red Belly, TRON, EOS, etc. But while most of them are only on the level of the idea or, in case of Credits, are controversial (because they don’t have Github repository and their demo videos are meeting a lot of criticism) Solana already provides the codebase and available for the test. With the current speed of the development project will be available for the public use before competitors.
Team points out next use cases of their product: payments, decentralized exchanges, distributed web services and storage, distributed ad exchanges.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY
While project shows a strong technological base, it’s not “making waves” in the social media aspect. Probably this is because the project, for now, is concentrating only on the product development and there are no marketing moves done yet. But in May 2018 team disclosed, that in one month number of their newsletter subscribers has increased from 12 000 to 30 000 and number of Telegram members crossed from 8 000 to 25 000 (right now 31 000+ members).
Medium: 350 average likes per post on average, no comments under posts.
Twitter: 4,5k followers, 40 likes and 10 retweets per post on average, no discussions under posts.
Telegram: 31,3k members, user activity is low.
Reddit (new): 817 followers, 1 comment on each post on average.
A big number of subscribers with the fact that user activity is very low tells about the possibility of the cheating with the userbase.

VERDICT
Solana is an interesting project with high probability to achieve aimed goals. While there is no active discussion of the project by the community and coverage by media, the strong team provides confidence in the product and its future.

Token distribution and partnerships q1 2019, so the tokens are over a year away, that's not a good sign already. All right, I mean an all-star team, I think I heard somebody saying that they had a long lock up as well and I mean it could be a good project, but I'm not really for projects with the long lock up. I definitely keep my eye on this, it's definitely worth adding to the watch list I'll have to do more homework on this.

Advantages.
1. Blockchain that maximizes scalability. They conducted a test net last February and have a relatively fast roadmap.
2. A model that supplements HashGraph. Stanford University's "Verifiable Delay Function" model has actually been implemented.
3. A blockchain, but relatively undervalued, included in the future of the `` blockchain scalability '' conference in California.
A complementary point
1. The highly scalable blockchain sphere is saturated with competitors.
2. Institutional investment have not yet participated in the sale.
3. There is no concrete token sale plan.

The Solana ICO holds serious prospects as a novel approach to achieving high-throughput and scalability. The domain experience of the team and advanced level of product development show positive indications of a strong project. While roadmap to scaling and adoption is not yet clear, as an early stage project, this does not present a particularly concerning issue.