Solana’s Million-View Meltdown: The Ad That Shocked Crypto Twitter

• The Solana ad hit 1.2 million views before being removed hours after launch, dividing the crypto community over its anti-woke messaging.
• Critics called the ad deletion reactive damage control, while supporters praised Solana for taking marketing risks despite the execution flaws.
• Amidst the controversy, Solana celebrates its 5th anniversary, preparing for the Firedancer upgrade, potentially enabling 1 million transactions per second.

Solana’s recent viral ad hit over 1.2 million views before being quickly removed just hours after it went live. Whether it was a marketing misstep or a strategic attempt, the controversial ad did grab people’s attention.

The 2-minute ad captioned ‘America is back. Time to Accelerate’ seemed like a satirical critique on various societal and political topics via exaggerated humor. It contains themes like tech innovation, freedom of speech, regulation, media bias, etc. Mainly, it dives into the American culture war with an anti-woke ad.

Solana's Million-View Meltdown: The Ad That Shocked Crypto Twitter 3

Whatever the intended message was, the ad quickly gained controversy. While some praised it for its bold stand against societal absurdity, others criticized it as tone-deaf, cringe, and pandering. Despite, deleting the video, the backlash continued, many calling it a “reactive damage control.” “A brand with real values stands by its messaging. SOL’s approach? Purely situational, not principle-driven,” wrote one critic.

Another felt that the marketing team could have put much more emphasis on more profound issues rather than trivial pronoun wars.

Missed Deeper Issues and Solana’s 5th Anniversary

It would have been much more effective to focus on deeper culture war issues like the “failings of the oppressor-oppressed worldview, not surface culture war issues like pronouns.” Many people perceive the pronoun commentary as punching down, which was not likely the intention.

However, many praised Solana’s willingness to “take risks in marketing and get people talking.”

Too many big orgs are too risk averse, they are not playing to win they are playing to not lose. But the execution could have been better and sent the same deeper message without alienating a portion of the audience on surface level issues.

Meanwhile, Solana recently turned five as the network prepares for the upcoming Firedancer upgrade. Developed by Jump Crypto, the upgrade aims to dramatically increase the network’s throughput to a theoretical maximum of 1 million transactions per second.