The Solana ecosystem has been in the limelight recently. The rise and popularity of projects such as Inscription NFT, Depin, and MeMe have enabled it to compete with the recently hot Bitcoin ecosystem, and its popularity far exceeds that of other public chains such as Ethereum.

As a public chain that was once deeply bound to the FTX platform, its price fell to single digits after the FTX crash. After nearly a year of dormancy, Solana's price has been rising all the way and has now climbed to US$97.

Moreover, in addition to the increase in Token value, a number of new projects with very good performance have emerged in the Solana ecosystem, which is indeed eye-catching.

The Solana ecosystem, which was hit hard by the FTX crash, has recently become a hot topic in the market. So, in addition to these dark horses that have already performed well, what other potential projects are there? Let's take stock together.

01 Overview of Solana Ecosystem

According to the latest data from DeFiLlama, the current TVL of the Solana ecosystem is around US$1 billion, ranking fifth among all public chains after Ethereum, Tron, BSC, and Arbitrum.

Solana ecosystem TVL, Solana price and whole chain revenue trend chart, data source: DeFiLlama

Before and after the FTX crash, the TVL of the Solana ecosystem dropped from nearly $1 billion to $300 million, and the price of Solana also dropped from 32U to a low of 14U. Nearly a year later, the TVL has exceeded the level before the FTX crash, and the token has risen sharply to more than $97.

Judging from the above figure of Solana's TVL, Token price and the revenue trend of the entire chain, the growth of Token price is far beyond the growth trend of TVL, and the growth of the revenue level of the entire chain has even exceeded the increase in Token price.

Of course, the current daily revenue on the Solana chain is not high, only tens of thousands of dollars, and the absolute data is not very referenceable. However, compared with Ethereum, TRON, BSC and Arbitrum, which are at the top of the TVL rankings, it has shown a very good growth trend.

Number of developers in each public chain ecosystem, data source: developerreport.com

Developers are the foundation of the development of a public chain ecosystem. Currently, there are not many Solana ecosystem developers, with a total of 946 full-time and part-time developers, ranking fifth among all public chains, not much different from the number of Bitcoin ecosystem developers.

As for the number of ecological projects, although there are many hot Solana ecological projects in recent months, from the perspective of the total number of projects, there are not many Solana ecological projects. Currently, DeFiLlama has included 104 projects, which is far lower than the top five TVL Ethereum, BSC and Arbitrum, and also lower than Avalanche, OP, Polygon and other ecosystems with less TVL. However, there are many dark horses that have emerged recently. It can be said that in terms of project quality, Solana ecology is still remarkable.

02 Pledge Agreement

According to the statistics of Staking rewards, the total staking amount of Solana has reached 400 million. Based on the current price, the total staking amount is estimated to be around US$28 billion, accounting for more than 71.4% of Solana's total market value.

Compared with Ethereum’s 23.7% staking ratio, Solana’s staking ratio is indeed very high, not only far exceeding Ethereum, but also exceeding most public chains. Therefore, there are also many staking projects on Solana. Among the top ten projects in TVL, 4 are liquidity staking protocols.

An overview of the changing market share of Solana Ecosystem Staking Protocol, data source: Dune@ilemi

Among them, Marinade Finance is the leader in the Solana ecosystem liquidity staking track and the project ranked first in the Solana ecosystem TVL. As an old project launched in 2021, it has a first-mover advantage. However, from the above Solana ecosystem staking protocol market share change chart, it is not difficult to see that the current market share of Marinade Finance (whose staking 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 pledge Solana in exchange for JitoSolana, and JitoSolana can help users obtain staking rewards and MEV rewards at the same time. Since October, Jito's staking data has begun to grow explosively, and its staking TVL is now not much different from that of Marinade Fiance, which ranks first. At the end of November, its governance token was launched on Coinbase and Binance at the same time, and it has been gaining momentum since its launch, making it the talk of the town.

Ranked third is Blaze Stake, whose staked token is bSOLl, launched in May 2022. Thanks to the overall outbreak of the Solana ecosystem, Blaze's token has also skyrocketed several times in recent months.

In addition to these star staking agreements, the Solana ecosystem also has some relatively innovative staking agreements for unissued tokens, which have also grown rapidly in recent times, and their Airdrop expectations have also attracted a lot of attention.

03 Depin

Depin (decentralized infrastructure network) is a track that has become popular recently. Based on the advantages of Solana's high speed and low fees, Solana's Depin has now covered multiple sub-sectors such as decentralized physical infrastructure, AI computing power, maps, and IOA services. A number of outstanding projects include Helium, Mobile, Hivemapper, DIMO, RNDR, etc.

Among them, Helium is a pioneer project in the Depin track and is also the leader of the current Solana ecological Depin track. Helium was founded in 2013 and is a distributed Internet of Things project. It initially used its own Layer1 network, and later migrated to the Solana ecosystem for reasons such as EVM compatibility and TPS. At present, Helium's IOT ecosystem is very mature compared to others. The recently popular Depin project Mobile is an ecological project of Helium, which has increased by more than 16 times in the past month.

Hivemapper and DIMO are both decentralized map projects that use tokens to incentivize users to provide driving map data. Both have launched tokens.

As a peer-to-peer rendering computing power matching AI platform, RNDR can be regarded as a recognized star project in the industry this year. With the rise of the AI ​​track, RNDR, as a representative project of the AI ​​track, has seen its market value rise all the way. Its current circulating market value has reached 1.6 billion US dollars. At the same time, it has hit the recently popular Depin track, and recently announced its expansion from Polygon to the Solana network, which has also attracted great attention.

04 NFT and inscriptions, etc.

Solana ecosystem’s recent inscriptions and NFTs have also attracted much attention. The two leading inscription projects, SOLs and Lamp, have developed well.

As the leading inscription project on the Solana chain, SOLs created a legend of five times the value in one day after its launch on CEX. It was very popular for a while. Although it has pulled back recently, it is still popular overall.

Lamp is also gaining momentum. As the smallest unit of Solana, the name Lamp, like Sats, also carries the MeMe attribute. Currently, the floor price of Lamp is 1.66solana, and the number of holding 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 was launched by Coral, the framework development company of Solana, and is issued 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 ceiling of Mad Lads. At present, the floor price of Mad Lads has exceeded 200sol, and it is likely to become the "bored ape" in the Solana ecosystem.

In addition to Mad Lads, many popular NFT projects have emerged in the Solana ecosystem in recent days, such as Open Solmap, which is comparable to Bitmap. Currently, there are more than 18,000 holders and a 24-hour trading volume of more than 50,000 SOL, ranking first in the Solana ecosystem NFT trading list.

And Saga, known as the “red box,” which ranks second in 24-hour trading volume (as of December 21), saw its floor price rise from 0.3 SOL to more than 14 SOL in just a few hours, and has now fallen back to around 5 SOL, which shows the enthusiasm and FOMO for NFTs in the Solana ecosystem.

05 MeMe

Speaking of MeMe, in addition to the inscriptions on major chains, the two most popular MeMes in the market recently are both from the Solana ecosystem, one is BONK and the other is Silly.

As the first MeMe in the Solana ecosystem, BONK has caused a sensation in the market with a growth of more than 50 times in the past two months. BONK is the first MeMe based on Shiba Inu in the Solana ecosystem. The Airdrop on Christmas Day last year attracted attention to the Solana community and indeed brought new vitality and confidence to the entire ecosystem when FXT crashed.

In the Solana blockchain phone Saga released in May this year, the 599 phone included 30 million BONK gifts, which were worth far more than the phone at the peak of BONK. As a result, the sales of the once unsalable Saga phone surged...

However, Bonk has lost its popularity recently, giving way to Silly, a new MeMe in the Solana ecosystem. Silly originated from the "dragon-shaped" costume that Solana co-founder Toly wore at a conference. Coupled with the concept of the Year of the Dragon, the MeMe Silly Dragon quickly became popular, with a rise of more than ten times in three days, which makes people have to sigh at the powerful FOMO force in this market.

06 DeFi Four Major Components

  • Oracle

Pyth network is the latest star project of the Solana ecosystem. For a long time, when people mention oracles, they naturally think of Chainlink. Pyth network has indeed added some fresh blood to the oracle track.

Pyth network mainly provides data for smart contract Dapp 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 more than 230 Dapps. It is a rare landing case in the oracle track in recent times.

  • Metonymy

In addition to the oracle Pyth Network, the performance of the lending protocol MarginFi in the past year has also been very eye-catching. MarginFi is currently the largest lending protocol in the Solana ecosystem, with a TVL of more than US$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 deposits, borrowing, and referrals. Since its launch, TVL has taken off, and in just half a year, TVL has increased by hundreds of times, becoming one of the fastest growing Dapps in the Solana ecosystem. Moreover, MarginFi has not yet issued a token. Given the recent cases of Solana ecosystem making big profits, MarginFi is indeed worth looking forward to.

In addition, Kamino, a lending protocol whose TVL is second only to MarginFi, has also attracted market attention recently due to the 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 in the Solana ecosystem. After suffering a cliff-like plunge of more than 90% in TVL during the FTX incident, it is now slowly recovering, with TVL returning to US$150 million. Especially after the introduction of the points system in August, both TVL and token prices began to rise rapidly.

  • DEX

Orca and Raydium are both native DEXs on Solana. Their TVLs exceeded $1 billion at their peak, and Raydium even exceeded $2 billion. However, under this round of bear market and the heavy blow of FTX, their TVLs have plummeted. Currently, Orca’s TVL is $160 million, and Raydium’s is only about half of Orca’s TVL.

Orca is the only DEX in the Solana ecosystem that has a pure automated market maker (AMM), which provides a better trading experience for users. Raydium, which was launched at about the same time as FTX, suffered a heavy blow during the FTX crash, and its Serum protocol, which shared liquidity with it, is currently not recovering as well as Orca.

Currently, the DEX in the Solana ecosystem has not performed well in this wave of Solana ecosystem craze, except that the DEX aggregator Jupiter attracted market attention due to the first batch of Airdrop in November.

  • other

Solana ecosystem has always used high-speed chains as a breakthrough point to compete with a number of public chains. Derivatives Dapp is obviously the application with the strongest demand for high speed and low fees in the current crypto industry. GMX, which was born in the Ethereum Layer2 leader Arbitrum ecosystem, is the best example, but unfortunately, Solana ecosystem has not seen any dark horse derivatives protocols.

Among the current derivatives, Drift’s TVL performance is still quite impressive. The FTX crash did not cause much impact. In the past year, TVL has increased by hundreds of times. In addition, since the Token has not been released yet, the Airdrop expectation has also attracted a lot of attention.

07 Summary

In short, in this recent bull market, from the inscription craze that was transmitted from the Bitcoin ecosystem to other public chains, to the rise of the Bitcoin ecosystem infrastructure, as well as the Depin, NFT, MeMe, infrastructure, etc. of the Solana ecosystem, the market heat and FOMO sentiment are still continuing, and there are many more stories of getting rich quickly in the entire market.

The rise and explosion of the Bitcoin ecosystem is not surprising. After all, as the leader of the encryption industry, a large amount of capital liquidity expectations and a variety of technological innovations will naturally bring prosperity to the ecosystem.

But the explosion of the Solana ecosystem has indeed brought a lot of surprises. After all, the collapse of FTX dealt a heavy blow to the liquidity of many important projects in the Solana ecosystem. The fact that it was able to recover quickly within just one year demonstrated the vitality and resilience of the Solana ecosystem with practical actions.

Recently, the term "Ethereum killer" has slowly begun to emerge again. People who once believed that Ethereum had seized all opportunities of public chains during the long bear market have begun to have expectations for the "killers".