After slight corrections, Solana is getting ready for the next surge

In definition, the panorama is an entire view of the whole region surrounding an observer. Therefore, we named this series “Panorama” to provide readers with the latest updates and news about one blockchain and its ecosystem. But above all, we want to bring useful and meaningful insights that benefit readers the most.

Before diving into this first Panorama about Solana, you should check out the Solana ecosystem article. And in this article, we’ll discuss important news and updates about Solana and its ecosystem.

• Solana new updates.
• DeFi in Solana had a slight pullback.
• NFT/Gaming on Solana is possibly the best candidate to dethrone NFTs on Ethereum.

Since August 2021, we’ve witnessed a mega bullish trend for Solana and its ecosystem. The SOL price has been skyrocketing from $30 to a new ATH $200. 

While the momentums of other blockchain platforms such as BSC, Ethereum, and Cardano seem to be exhausted in late 2021, Solana is keeping its pace to prepare for the upcoming surge.

Furthermore, there will be some insights given by Coin98 Insights. Let’s find out!

Solana Overview

On October 13th, 2021, Binance announced that their platform has completed the integration of USC-SPL and USDT-SPL tokens to Binance Exchange. This means users can now withdraw USDC and USDT to their SPL wallets instead of only SOL like before. 

The withdrawal fee of USDC and USDT on Binance is cheaper than directly withdrawing SOL to SPL wallets.

In the above chart, you can see that Solana is ranked the first in the third-gen blockchain leaderboard with over 78% SOL staked in validators’ nodes. Therefore, SOL holders who choose to stake decide to earn profits via staking rewards with the Solana blockchain, enhancing the long-term trust for Solana.

The total amount of stake on the Solana network increases, which will make it more difficult to be interfered with and manipulated even if there are well-funded attackers. This strengthens the overall decentralization and the community-oriented trait of Solana.

Solana Ecosystem Analysis

It’s no doubt that the Solana ecosystem is just behind the Ethereum and BSC ecosystems in the number of native projects. With over 300 projects in every lego part, it has outperformed other blockchain platforms such as Terra, Fantom, or Avalanche. 

Talking about the TVL of the Solana ecosystem, it had a very quick recovery after the last TVL correction. It took about one month for the TVL to slightly break the previous peak, showing that the cash flow is coming back to the ecosystem.

DEXs

Cyclos is going to release its mainnet at the end of October 2021. What makes Cyclos different from other existing AMM on Solana is the adoption of concentrated liquidity (similar to Uniswap v3). After the mainnet, we will be able to try the Cyclos platform, and let’s see the upcoming feature of Cyclos.

Saros is an original project from Coin98 Labs that focuses on building an all-in-one DeFi station on Solana. We have already had articles explaining how Saros works and how to use Saros.

The Orca Fall Festival has finished, yielding positive results to the project since its TVL increased to over $1 billion. The reason for the growth is the NFT staking model. 

Atrix partnered with Almond to release the yield farming program with extremely high APY pools, boosting the TVL of both platforms to hundreds of million-dollar value. The TVL is now stable after the rapid rise. However, the ATRIX token is yet to be released and the ALM token of Almond has almost no use case except for the yield farming purpose. This might cause a negative effect on the ALM and ATRIX price in the future.

Lending

The following chart shows that lending projects on Solana are still not attracting lots of TVL inside the ecosystem despite the overall TVL growth. 

The lending TVL of Solana-based projects is so fragmented that it is distributed to every lending project almost equally. Furthermore, the utilization rate is quite low, resulting in capital inefficiency. Therefore, those projects need to release a unique feature or functionality of the token that makes them different from the rest to attract the cash flow.

Notably, Solend released the Retroactive Liquidity Mining program for users who supplied and borrowed SPL tokens on the platform. Furthermore, the program still continues with SLND rewards multiplied corresponding to the token supplied/borrowed.

Launchpad

Since the beginning of October 2021, only a few projects have been launched on Solana-based launchpads. For example, Solanium launched 4 projects in September and August with the ROIs (ATH) of over 20x, but the IDO hype seems to be exhausted as the most recent IDO just had an ROI (ATH) of 10x.

Solstarter and Solster haven’t released their IDO platforms. They might wait to catch the right market sentiment for the best support of the community.

StarLaunch is a new IDO platform on Solana that applies the insurance fund to ensure investors’ long-term benefits. This feature is from the Cardano-based launchpad Cardstarter as the StarLaunch development team is from the Cardstarter team. On October 24th, 2021, StarLaunch released registration of the STARS token public sale for investors.

NFT

NFT/Gaming on Solana is getting hot since multiple gaming platforms released teasers/trailers for their products.

Aurory released an IDO featuring the game trailer. At the time of writing, they have had over 200M USDC contributed into Aurory’s IDO after 2 days. It’s an impressive number for an NFT/Gaming project.

Star Atlas released its trailer on Oct 6th, 2021. Basically, it’s like a combination of Avatar, Starwars movies, and the metaverse trend. Therefore, it is expected to release the mainnet soon.

Aurory and Start Atlas are notable examples of the NFT/Gaming trend on Solana, representing the upcoming wave as their products are released. We will update and there will be more articles about the NFT/Gaming and metaverse world in the future. So stay tuned.

Conclusion

To sum up, we will conclude the key highlights of the Solana panorama for readers’ convenience:

• The Solana blockchain is now completed and it’s getting more acceptance from other organizations. Furthermore, the community now drives Solana to decentralization.
• DEXs, lending projects, and launchpads on Solana seem to be slowing down after the last super-fast growth, which might result in the over-valued tokens. Therefore, the ecosystem needs time to take a break for the next movement.
• NFT/Gaming on Solana is in a hurry for release to the community.

Therefore, the Solana ecosystem is getting up the speed for the upcoming wave of the crypto world. 

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!

Learn more: Coin98 co-sponsors VN Regional Track in Solana Season Hackathon