Solana Ecosystem is ready to be back to the game
Since the beginning of 2021, the Solana ecosystem has been one of the most fast-developing ecosystems in the crypto world. The number of projects on Solana started from a few to hundreds
Solana has overcome other major blockchain platforms such as Cardano, Polkadot, and Avalanche to have a solid place in top-5 projects in terms of market capitalization. This proves the potential of the high-speed and low-fee Solana blockchain. Along with SOL, other SPL tokens on Solana are receiving lots of capital from investors.
Before going further, if you should check out the Solana Ecosystem article to get a better overview of Solana. And in this article, we’ll discuss important news and updates about Solana and its ecosystem.
- Solana new updates.
- DeFi and Lening are being saturated.
- Launchpads on Solana are back to work.
- NFT/Metaverse on Solana.
Moreover, there will be some insights given by Coin98 Insights. Let’s find out!
Solana Ecosystem Overview
Solana on Twitter has reached over 1 million followers. This milestone is significant to the Solana ecosystem as well as the community. More people are joining the Solana community to contribute meaningful acts.
According to on-chain numbers, the Solana blockchain has outperformed other blockchain platforms in terms of total transactions with over 42B completed transactions and over 77% total SOL being staked in blockchain validators.
The TVL of Solana has been constantly approaching close to the number of $15B. The DEX sector is still dominating most of the Solana TVL. However, the asset management sector is increasing by over $5.7B in Total Value Locked. This shows the cash flow is looking for capital optimization for better yields.
In the chart, the green chunk indicates the TVL of derivatives in Solana. Solana-based derivatives are potential since they inherit the upsides of fast transactions with fairly low fees of Solana.
The number of USDT and USDC stablecoins circulating inside the Solana ecosystem has been rising upward to over $4.5B recently. USDC is flowing in the ecosystem to meet the demand for stable assets which are like blood in the body. Based on the historical data of Solana, the SOL price is correlated to the growth of in-ecosystem stablecoins.
Stablecoin is an important metric that shows the potential expansion of the ecosystem.
Read more about stablecoin: What is Stablecoin?
Solana Breakpoint
Solana Breakpoint is the largest conference ever organized by Solana Labs, Solana Foundation, and other partners. During the 3 days of the conference, all Solana team, guests, and invited projects have shared a lot about the reached milestones and what’s coming next for Solana.
Check out the recap of Solana Breakpoint:
Alexis Ohanian - the founder of Seven Seven Six venture capital - has announced to invest $100M into Web3 and Social Media development inside the Solana ecosystem. This news has shifted the attention of the Solana community to decentralized social media and web3 projects.
The web browser Brave with over 1B existing user base partnered with Solana Labs to integrate Solana blockchain into the browser as default. This means Brave users will be able to access Solana natively on the web browser. This will help Solana expand to a larger user base for development.
Ecosystem Analysis
Overall, the Solana ecosystem can now be a strong competitor with the BSC ecosystem and the Ethereum ecosystem. Numerous new crypto projects have covered all the important legos of Solana. More and more new projects will board Solana. The Solana Hackaton has been actively organized, which is expected to welcome over thousands of new ideas in the next upcoming years.
DEXs
After a long bullish trend for Solana-based DEXs, they are stabilizing and not making any new breakthroughs. This indicates that the DEX lego of Solana has become somewhat saturated as every SPL token can be traded seamlessly on over 10 DEXs.
Atrix is still developing fast after the partnership with Almond to release a yield farming program in October 2021. The TVL of Atrix is over $700M which is comparatively close to Saber’s TVL.
In addition to the permissionless pools, Atrix has not released its native token yet. This might be an opportunity for users to hunt potential retroactive airdrop from Atrix Finance.
Learn more: What is Retroactive Airdrop?
Lending
Like AMM DEXs, Lending on Solana is somewhat saturated with many operating lending projects. Each lending project will own a fragmented amount of liquidity, which is a very competitive race. The overall TVL of the lending sector on Solana is yet to have any breakout to attract more cash flow.
Launchpad
IDO (Initial DEX Offering) is always the best method to raise funds from investors. Projects can receive a huge number of funds and attention from the community. It’s like a debut for projects in the public. As we can see in the following table of upcoming IDO events, they make the Solana ecosystem abundant and diversified.
Upcoming IDOs on Solana. Source: Solanians_The upcoming IDOs range from infrastructure projects (Run Node) to the latest metaverse trend (Tiny Colony). This can be called the IDO season of Solana. However, with a high number of new IDOs, investors can’t participate in them all. Therefore, we should evaluate the projects that launch IDO thoroughly.
- ROI (Return on Investment) of other IDOs on the same platform.
- How regularly does the IDO platform launch projects? (1 a month or more?)
- Are IDOs long-term investments or pump-dump schemes?
Solstarter has been started after a long period of time with no updates on Twitter (since May 2021). It launched Kaizen Finance as the first IDO on the platform. And the next IDO will be the RPC provider RunNode which has recently raised over $8.1M in the seed round.
Starlaunch now allows users to stake their $STARS into the Fusion Vault to earn $N2H4 as staking rewards. $N2H4 will be used to participate in IDOs launched on the Starlaunch platform. This IDO platform has creatively built a universe-themed and unique launchpad that excites users.
NFT and Metaverse
In late November 2021, Orca sold its collection of 10,000 unique NFTs called Orcanauts. The NFT sale was successfully completed with a sale price of ~0.6 SOL for each Orcanaut. Users can buy and sell their Orcanauts on the Solana-based NFT marketplace Magiceden.
However, the floor price for the Orca NFT has been about 0.3 SOL. This means an NFT with no utility now has fairly low liquidity (low buying demand). On the other hand, Orca is expected to release use cases for the Orcanaut NFT collection in the future.
Metaverse is one of the hottest keywords in 2021 since multiple big tech companies announced plans to invest in this potential area. Facebook changed its name to Meta referring to a metaverse world. On Solana, there are multiple projects that are ready to join this metaverse trend as in the following infographic.
Solice has raised over $4M in the early funding round led by Three Arrow Capital, DeFiance Capital, and Animocabrands. This indicates that metaverse on Solana also receives lots of attention from investors. Nobody wants to step out of the game.
Derivatives
Derivatives on Solana just take up a small portion of the total TVL inside the ecosystem. Whether Solana-based derivatives trading platforms can compete with those on Ethereum like dYdX, Perpetual Swap, etc.
Hxro Network raised $34M in a funding round led by trading firms Susquehanna and Jump Crypto. It is going to build a derivatives platform on Solana. Despite HXRO token release, Hxro Network is still not on Solana mainnet. However, with the massive funds from big investors, we can expect the derivatives market built by Hxro Network will be heated.
Drift Protocol announced the mainnet released for users to participate in trading derivatives on the platform. Previously, users needed special Drift NFTs to have access to the platform, but now everyone can trade derivatives such as SOL, BTC, and ETH.
Bridges
Wormhole partnered with FTX to connect wrapped assets, including: whETH, whFTT, whUBXT, whLINK, whSXP, whYFI, whSUSHI, whALEPH, whCREAM, whUNI, whFRONT, whAKRO, whMATH & whHXRO. This will connect the liquidity between CEX and DEX inside Solana.
Neon Labs has raised $40M to build an infrastructure that allows developers to build EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) applications on Solana. This will improve the functionality of the Solana blockchain to a further extent. The first project built on Neon EVM is Neonswap which is forked from Uniswap V2. Users can give it a try since it might have potential retroactive airdrops for early adopters.
Conclusion
To sum up, we will conclude the key highlights of the Solana panorama for readers’ convenience:
- Solana has reached many significant milestones such as 1M followers on Twitter, the percentage of total SOL staked. In Particular, the number of stablecoin circulating is growing fast.
- Solana Breakpoint has described the upcoming future of Solana with numerous knot-knitted partnerships and new projects.
- DeFi and Lending are going slow after a bullish run in the Solana summer. A necessary boost is needed for the two sectors.
- Launchpads are getting hot with multiple new IDO events.
- Other lego parts are being assembled to build up a strong ecosystem.
And that is all you need to know about the most recent updates of the Solana ecosystem. I hope you’ve gained the overview and our insights will be useful to you. There will be more new Solana panorama articles in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned!
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