The Ethereum Killer has resurfaced. What other potential projects are there in the Solana ecosystem?
Original author: Joyce
The Solana ecosystem has been in the spotlight recently. The rise and popularity of projects such as Inscription NFT, Depin, and MeMe have made it compete with the Bitcoin ecosystem that has continued to be hot recently, and its popularity is far higher than other public chains such as Ethereum.
As a public chain that was once deeply bound to the FTX platform, the price once fell to single digits after the FTX thunderstorm. After nearly a year of dormancy, the price of Solana has been rising and has now climbed to 97 US dollars.
Moreover, in addition to the increase in Token, a number of new projects with very good performance have emerged in the Solana ecosystem, which is really eye-catching.
The Solana ecosystem, which was once hit hard by the FTX thunderstorm, has become a hot spot in the market recently. So, in addition to these dark horses that have already performed well, what other potential projects are there? Let’s take stock together.
Solana Ecosystem Overview
According to the latest data from DeFiLlama, the current TVL of Solana ecosystem is about one billion US dollars, ranking fifth among all public chains after Ethereum, Tron, BSC, and Arbitrum.
Solana ecological TVL, Solana price and entire chain revenue trend chart, data source: DeFiLlama
Before and after the FTX thunderstorm, the TVL of Solana ecosystem fell from nearly 1 billion US dollars to 300 million US dollars, and the Solana price also fell from 32 U to a low of 14 U. Nearly a year later, TVL has now exceeded the level before the FTX thunderstorm, and the Token has risen sharply, exceeding $97.
Judging from Solana’s TVL, Token price and the income change trend of the entire chain in the above figure,The growth of Token price far exceeds the growth trend of TVL, and the growth of the income level of the entire chain exceeds the increase of Token price.
Of course, the current daily income on the Solana chain is not high, only tens of thousands of dollars, and the absolute data is not very referenceable. However, compared to Ethereum, TRON, BSC and Arbitrum, which rank at the top of TVL, they show a very good growth trend.
Number of developers in each public chain ecosystem, data source: developerreport.com
Developers are the foundation for the ecological development of a public chain. Currently, there are only a small number of developers in the Solana ecosystem. There are 946 full-time and part-time developers in total, ranking fifth among all public chains.The number of developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem is not much different.
As for the number of ecological projects, although there are many Solana ecological hot projects that have popped up in recent months,However, judging from the total number of projects, there are not many Solana ecological projects.Currently, DeFiLlama includes 104, which is far lower than the top five TVL Ethereum, BSC and Arbitrum, and also lower than the TVL-less ecosystems such as Avalanche, OP, Polygon, etc.However, there are many dark horses that have emerged recently. It can be said that in terms of project quality, the Solana ecosystem is still remarkable.
Pledge Agreement
According to Staking rewards statistics, Solana’s total pledge amount has reached 400 million.At the current price, the total pledged amount is estimated to be approximately US$28 billion, accounting for more than 71.4% of Solanas total market value.
Compared with Ethereums 23.7% pledge ratio, Solanas pledge ratio is indeed very high, not only far exceeding Ethereum, but also exceeding most public chains.Therefore, there are many staking projects on Solana. Four of the top ten projects in TVL are liquidity staking protocols.
Overview of market share changes in Solana’s ecological pledge agreement, data source: Dune@ilemi
Among them, Marinade Finance is the leader in Solana’s ecological liquidity staking track and is also the No. 1 project in Solana’s ecological TVL.As a veteran project launched in 2021, it has a first-mover advantage. However, it is not difficult to see from the Solana ecological pledge agreement market share change chart above that the current market share of Marinade Finance (its pledge token is msol) is constantly being eroded.
Jito is a dark horse that has performed very well recently, and its staking share has grown very steeply in the past year.Jito is the first staking protocol in the Solana ecosystem to allocate MEV rewards to users. Users can mortgage Solana in exchange for JitoSolana, and JitoSolana can help users obtain staking rewards and MEV rewards at the same time. Starting in October, Jitos staking data began to grow explosively, and now its staking TVL is not much different from the number one Marinade Fiance. At the end of November, its governance token was listed on Coinbase and Binance at the same time, and it gained momentum after being launched, and it became a hit.
Ranked third is Blaze Stake, whose pledge token is bSOLl.Launched in May 2022, thanks to the overall explosion of the Solana ecosystem, Blazes token has also surged several times in recent months.
In addition to these star staking protocols, the Solana ecosystem also has some relatively innovative staking protocols for unissued tokens. The recent growth has also been very rapid, and its Airdrop is expected to attract a lot of attention.
Depin
Depin (decentralized infrastructure network) is a hot track recently. Based on Solana’s advantages of high speed and low fees,At present, Depin of the Solana ecosystem has covered multiple sub-sectors such as decentralized physical infrastructure, AI computing power, maps, and IOA services.A number of projects with outstanding performance include Helium, Mobile, Hivemapper, DIMO, RNDR, etc.
Among them, Helium is the pioneer project of the Depin track and is currently the leader of the Solana ecological Depin track.Helium was founded in 2013. It is a distributed IoT project. It initially used its own Layer 1 network, and later moved to the Solana ecosystem considering EVM compatibility and TPS. Currently, Heliums IOT ecosystem is very mature compared to others. ,The recently popular Depin project Mobile is Heliums ecological project, with an increase of more than 16 times in the past month.
Hivemapper and DIMO are both decentralized map projects.To encourage users to provide driving map data through tokens, both have launched tokens.
As a point-to-point rendering computing power matching AI platform, RNDR can be regarded as a star project recognized in the industry this year.With the rise of the AI track, the market value of RNDR, as a representative project of the AI track, has been rising. The current circulating market value has reached 1.6 billion US dollars. At the same time, it has hit the recently popular Depin track, coupled with the recent announcement of expansion from Polygon to the Solana network. The heat is also very good.
NFT and inscriptions, etc.
Solana Ecosystem’s recent inscriptions and NFTs have also attracted much attention. The two head inscription projects - SOLs and Lamp are developing well.
SOLs, as the leader of the inscription project on the Solana chain,After being listed on CEX, it created a legend of five times a day. It was very popular for a while. Although there has been a correction recently, overall the popularity is still good.
Lamp is also gaining momentum. As the smallest unit of Solana, the name Lamp also has the MeMe attribute like Sats.The current floor price of Lamp is 1.66 solana, and the number of held addresses exceeds 5,200.
In addition to inscriptions, NFTs in the Solana ecosystem have been very popular recently. The leading NFT that has emerged in recent months is Mad Lads.Mad Lads is launched by Coral, the framework development company of Solana, and is released using its own wallet Backpack. Its advantage is that Mad Lads is in the form of xNFT. In the future, DeFi, GameFi, etc. can be directly operated through xNFT, which completely opens up the imagination of Mad Lads. At present, the floor price of Mad Lads has exceeded 200 sol, and it is likely to become a boring ape in the Solana ecosystem.
In addition to Mad lads, many popular NFT projects have emerged in the Solana ecosystem in recent days, such asOpen Solmap, which benchmarks Bitmap,Currently, there are more than 18,000 holders, and the 24-hour transaction volume exceeds 50,000 SOL, ranking first among Solana ecological NFT transactions.
And Saga, which ranks second in 24-hour trading volume (as of December 21), is known as the “red box”.In just a few hours, the floor price rose from 0.3 SOL to over 14 SOL, and now it has dropped back to around 5 SOL, which shows the enthusiasm and FOMO of Solana ecological NFT.
MeMe
When it comes to MeMe, in addition to the inscriptions on major chains,The two most popular MeMes on the market recently are both from the Solana ecosystem, one is BONK and the other is Silly.
BONK, as the first MeMe in the Solana ecosystem,The increase of more than 50 times in the past two months caused a sensation in the market. BONK is the first MeMe based on the Shiba Inu in the Solana ecosystem. The Airdrop last Christmas attracted attention in the Solana community, and it really brought new vitality and confidence to the entire ecosystem at the time of the FXT thunder.
In the Solana blockchain mobile phone Saga released in May this year, the mobile phone priced at 599 includes 30 million BONK as gifts.At its peak, BONK was worth far more than a mobile phone, which led to a surge in sales of the once unsalable Saga mobile phone...
However, Bonk’s popularity has faded recently, giving way to the new MeMe Silly of Solana ecology.Silly originated from the dragon-shaped costume worn by Solana co-founder Toly at a conference, coupled with the concept of the Year of the Dragon, Silly Dragon, a MeMe, quickly became popular, with an increase of more than ten times in three days. People have to lament this market. The power of FOMO is powerful.
The four major pieces of DeFi
Oracle
Pyth network is the latest star project of Solana ecosystem.For a long time, when it comes to oracle machines, what everyone thinks of is Chainlink. The Pyth network has indeed added some fresh blood to the oracle machine track.
Pyth network mainly provides data for smart contract Dapps by obtaining data from top trading platforms, market makers and financial service providers. Currently, Pyth is connected to more than 90 data sources such as CBOE, Binance, OKX, Bybit, etc., and has supported 230 Multiple Dapps are a rare recent implementation case on the oracle machine track.
loan
In addition to the oracle Pyth network, the lending protocol MarginFi has also performed very well in the past year.MarginFi is currently the largest lending protocol in the Solana ecosystem, with TVL exceeding $300 million, second only to the two leading staking protocols, Marinade Finance and Jito.
MarginFi launched a points system in July to reward users for their deposits, loans, and recommendations. Since its launch, TVL has taken off. TVL has grown hundreds of times in just six months, becoming one of the fastest-growing TVL Dapps in the Solana ecosystem. Moreover, MarginFi has not issued Token yet. In view of the recent cases of Solana ecology repeatedly making money, MarginFi is indeed worth looking forward to.
In addition, Kamino, TVL’s lending agreement second only to MarginFi, has recently attracted market attention due to news of its upcoming Airdrop.Kamino is also one of the fastest-growing DeFi protocols in the Solana ecosystem. After its launch in September last year, its TVL has reached US$1.4 billion.
Solend was once the leader of Solana ecological lending. After suffering a cliff-like plunge of more than 90% of TVL in the FTX incident, it is now slowly recovering.TVL returned to US$150 million. Especially after the points system was launched in August, both TVL and token prices began to recover rapidly.
DEX
Orca and Raydium are both native DEXs on Solana.The TVL of both once exceeded US$1 billion at their peak, and Raydium even exceeded US$2 billion. However, under this round of bear market and the heavy blow of FTX, the TVL of both has plummeted.Currently, Orca TV L is US$160 million, and Raydium is only about half of Orca TV L.
Orca is the only DEX in the Solana ecosystem that has a pure automatic market maker (AMM), which provides users with a better trading experience.As Raydium, which was launched at about the same time, the Serum protocol, which shared liquidity with it during the FTX thunderstorm, suffered heavy losses, and it seems that its recovery is not as good as Orcas at present.
At present, DEX in the Solana ecosystem has not performed much in this wave of Solana ecological craze, except for the DEX aggregator Jupiter, which attracted market attention due to the first batch of Airdrop investments in November.
other
The Solana ecosystem has always used high-speed chains as a breakthrough to compete with public chains. Derivatives Dapp is obviously the application with the strongest demand for high-speed and low fees in the current encryption industry.GMX, which was born in the Arbitrum ecosystem, the leader of Ethereums Layer 2, is the best example. However, unfortunately, there has been no dark horse derivatives protocol in the Solana ecosystem.
Among the current derivatives, Drift’s TVL performance is relatively impressive. The FTX thunderstorm incident did not have much impact. TVL has increased hundreds of times in the past year. In addition, the Token has not been released yet, and Airdrop is expected to attract a lot of attention.
summary
In short, in the recent bull market, from the inscription craze transmitted from the Bitcoin ecosystem to other public chains, to the rise of Bitcoin ecological infrastructure, as well as Solana ecological Depin, NFT, MeMe, infrastructure, etc., market enthusiasm and FOMO sentiment are still there. Continuing, there are also many stories of getting rich in the entire market.
The rise and explosion of the Bitcoin ecosystem is no surprise. After all, as the leader of the crypto industry, large amounts of capital liquidity expectations and various technological innovations will naturally bring about ecological prosperity.
But the outbreak of the Solana ecosystem has indeed brought a lot of surprises. After all, the FTX thunderstorm has severely damaged the liquidity of many important projects in the Solana ecosystem. It can quickly recover in just one year, which shows the strength of the Solana ecosystem with practical actions. Vitality and resilience.
Recently, the term Ethereum killer has slowly begun to appear again. During the long bear market, people who once thought that Ethereum had seized all opportunities in the public chain began to look forward to the killers again.
