The Good, Bad, and Ugly
Good
Solana is popular with a growing ecosystem. Some significant Solana projects are Civic, Audius, Raydium, Serum, FTX, and many NFT marketplaces (thanks to Metaplex).
Solana uses Rust, making it easier for pre-existing Rust developers to jump into development. On top of it, they have a stable framework called Anchor that abstracts out a lot of complex code and makes it easy for beginner Rust developers.
Solana's most significant selling point is their high Transaction Per Second (~50,000 TPS), one of the highest among popular blockchain networks.
Bad
A high number of validators keeps the network secure and available. As of 1/10/2021, there are only 1,371 validators up. Running a Solana node can get expensive; you need a 128GB RAM machine with a CPU around 3GHz+, and the recommended hardware (AMD Ryzen) can cost around $729.
Ugly
There have been multiple network outages within a year, one on 9/14/21 and another on…
