Solana 2021 Year In Review Report: A crypto metropolis on top of Solana

2021 is a stepping stone for the Solana ecosystem in 2022. This Solana 2021 Report belongs to the Year In Review series released by Coin98 Insights. 

2021 is an important milestone for the crypto space as well as the global financial market since numerous remarkable records have been made. We hope that this article will remind us of the memorable journey of Solana throughout 2021. 

Solana and its ecosystem are all-encompassing in this article, compiled by Coin98 Insights. This includes all events, milestones, and highlight numbers of Solana. Additionally, Coin98 Insights’ researchers will try to deliver valuable insights and some future predictions to readers through the article.

It’s not only about 2021, but also 2022 and many other years. We hope this article and our latest 2021 Solana Report (pdf file) will be the left and right arms for you in crypto.

Note: You can download the 2021 Solana Report (pdf file) at: https://c98.link/Solanians-SolanaReport2021v1

Looking back at Solana in 2021

How it began

In this section, we will take a look back at how Solana began at the beginning of 2021, which will be divided into 2 main smaller sections:

• Ecosystem Overview.
• Highlight statistics.

1. Ecosystem Overview

At first, let’s take a look back to January 2021 where the SOL price was not included in the top list.

At the beginning of 2021, SOL just had a market capitalization of $0.1B which was down below in the crypto leaderboard.

After the mainnet release in 2020, the Solana blockchain came into 2021 with a web-built ecosystem containing many crypto projects from various sectors. Solana is famous for its high-speed transactions with considerably low fees. Therefore, it is the destination for blockchain-based projects that require those competitive features.

Infrastructure, Tools, Exchanges, and Wallets are fundamental components of a complete ecosystem. As we can see, Solana was well-prepared for the staggering growth in the second half of 2021. The smart contract backbone of Solana is the Rust and C/C++ programming languages which have a large community of developers.

2. 2021 Highlight Statistics of Solana in early 2021:

• $1B was the market cap of SOL in January 2021.
• ~50 was the number of projects on Solana
• $150M was the TVL of Solana in April 2021.

How it is growing

1. Ecosystem Overview

Solana took all the spotlight in the second half of 2021 since this PoS blockchain platform, and its native tokens have had exponential growth. 

The market cap of SOL has increased to $54B, which means by 540x compared to the beginning of 2021. It surpassed other blockchain platforms such as Cardano, Polkadot, Tezos, Algorand, etc. The development strategy of Solana has yielded the best outcome.

Speaking of the Solana ecosystem, it’s like a metropolis that contains hundreds of crypto projects built on Solana.

Infrastructure, Stablecoin, Bridge, SDK, Staking Platforms, Tools, and Wallets are the backbone of Solana. Those projects support a solid base to provide developers and end-users with the necessary infrastructure and tools. The developed infrastructure frame of Solana primarily contributes to the ecosystem’s success in 2021.

NFTs, NFT marketplace, Gaming, and metaverse platforms on Solana were casting storm in the second half of 2021. Despite most platforms only in the early stages of development, the cash flow was pouring into these niches then the hype got exhausted. However, it was successful when catching the public attention to Solana.

DeFi on Solana is a hit in the crypto space since the DeFi projects inherit the upside advantages of Solana blockchain technology. Solana facilitates all components in the DeFi lego such as DEX, Lending Platform, Derivatives, Options, Predictions, Asset Management, etc. Raydium, Serum, Marinade Finance, Orca, Saber, Tulip Protocol, etc., are DeFi projects with the largest TVL in the Solana ecosystem. 

2. Highlight numbers at the end of 2021:

• $78B was the ATH market cap of Solana (x780) (in the top 5 for a while).
• $250 was the ATH price of SOL.
• ~300 was the number of projects on Solana (x6).
• $15B was the TVL on Solana (100x).

The total supply of USDT and USDC inside Solana is an excellent metric to measure the expansion of the ecosystem. It’s like blood circulating in the ecosystem. New users have to use stablecoins (USDC and USDT) as a medium of exchange. Therefore, with this stablecoin metric, we can estimate the possible size of the ecosystem.

Solana's Key Milestones in 2021

Q1 2021

• Solrise Finance with 1000 funds on Testnet.
• Raydium introduced Fusion pools offering dual yield rewards.
• Solana Beach updated.
• Solstarter and Step Finance came into the Solana ecosystem.

Q2 2021

• Phantom released Ethereum-Solana bridge and NFT support.
• Hedgehog beta launch competition.
• BonFida mainnet supports trading strategies and technical indicators.
• Pyth Network came into Solana.
• Synthetify went live.

• SOL listed Coinbase.
• TVL on Solana broke $1.4B.
• Over 10,000 developers registered for the Solana Season Hackathon
• Solana Hackathon made waves across the community.
• Solana Beach got some improvements in UI/UX.
• DeFi Alliance announced the ecosystem support for Solana.

Q3 2021

• $C98 IEO on Binance.
• Solana $5M creator fund received 175+ applications.
• Evernew Capital $20M for Solana ecosystem growth.
• Solana Season Demo Day.
• Saber raised $7.7M in a seed funding round.
• Hedgehog Markets raised $3.5 in a seed round.

• TVL peaked at $3B.
• Solsea is 1st NFT marketplace on Solana.
• Coin98 raised $12.5M from investors.

• SOL ATH was $210.
• Ignition A global Solana Hackathon $5M in prizes and funds for DeFi, Gaming, NFT, Web 3.0 projects.
• Solana announced the ignition workshop for builders and the Breakpoint Global Fellows program.
• Network outage as the Solana network peaked at 400k TPS.

Q4 2021

• Solana NFT marketplace on FTX US.
• Users can deposit and withdraw USDC and USDT on Solana Network (SPL).
• Solana Monkey Business NFT was sold for $2M.
• ATH $240.
• TVl $15B.
• Solana Breakpoint at Lisbon in November 2021.
• Phantom reached 1M users.
• Solana announced $100M for NFT/Gaming projects on Solana.

• Drift, Zeta, and Katana released Testnet/Mainnet.
• Over 1,300 validators around the globe.
• Michael Jordan and Stephen Curry joined the Solana ecosystem to release NFTs and build a fan engagement platform.
• Art Project in Indonesia had a $70,000 total prize pool.

Solana in 2022

2021 is an explosive year for Solana. It’s stepping into 2022 with all confidence to keep growing. The next blockchain competitors of Solana are Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum. These two ecosystems will be the upcoming target of Solana in the coming years.

Although Solana comes late in the crypto race with BSC and Ethereum, it has a better solution for the blockchain trilemma. Therefore, the potential of dethroning them to become the largest (or second) ecosystem in the crypto space is a possible future. However, there are numerous things that need to be done to move the ecosystem further.

To conclude, the following predictions from Coin98 Insights should be considered as opinions (not financial advice):

• Higher layers of DeFi (Derivatives, Asset Management, Aggregator): This uncharted layer will be able to utilize the full potential of Solana’s high-speed blockchain technology.
• NFT/Gaming projects: In 2021, this sector exploded and had a huge correction for months. However, NFTs and Games on Solana are innovating with more utilities and business models for their products.
• Serum Ecosystem: +25 projects are built on top of the liquidity center Serum. We can name Seruum as a smaller ecosystem under the Solana ecosystem. The project has the ambition to acquire more users and developers to the ecosystem in 2022.

Conclusion

We’re glad to deliver the 2021 report, including some 2022 predictions for Solana and its ecosystem. I hope you get the development overview of Solana in 2021 and what will come next. Like 2021, 2022 is going to be wild for Solana as well as the crypto space.

This Year In Review Series includes 2021 reports (include predictions) from other blockchain platforms. You can check out Solana 2021 Report (in pdf format): https://c98.link/Solanians-SolanaReport2021v1