Solana’s popularity has been gradually increasing recently. If you invested in Solana at the beginning of 2021, you would have made a return of about 13,000% last year.
Pretty cool, right? What’s even more astounding is that the Solana ecosystem already has more than 400 applications, with a total value locked in the network of more than $9.8 billion, according to SolanaProject.com.
In this video we’ll dive into the top ten projects of Solana’s planetary ecology.
Mercurial Finance
Mercurial, ranked 10th, is the first project on the Solana network to focus on stablecoin trading. The platform received a $100,000 startup investment from industry accelerator DeFi Alliance and currently has a total value locked of $62.57 million.
Beyond that, there’s another reason why it’s on our list: its token (MER) is currently listed on FTX, Gate.io, Raydium, and Serum Dex.
The project’s token allocation is currently relatively fragmented, with 50% allocated to the Mercurial Foundation and the team allocating 10% and 20% to private placements.
Parrot Protocol
Next up is the Parrot protocol, which focuses on enabling users to access the value locked in DeFi systems, allowing liquidity to flow again.
The project issues its own stablecoin, PAI (anchored to $1), which allows holders to borrow from lenders and seamlessly withdraw their locked value, and Parrot Finance also rewards governance tokens to users willing to lock their tokens.
The application currently has a total value locked of $86.86 million since its mainnet launch in June 2021, having raised $84 million through two successful IDOs. Now that it has grown to offer a full suite of DeFi products, the supply of Parrot tokens is capped at 2.1 billion.
It is worth noting that although the protocol technology is relatively complex, the user interface itself is very smooth and silky. The Parrot platform allows users to mint tokens and earn treasury income and rewards with one click.
Mango Markets
In eighth place is Mango Markets, with a staggering total trading volume of $126.39 million.
The Solana-based platform, which initially focused on lending markets, raised $70 million through its MNGO token sale in August 2021, and Mango Markets has since expanded its offerings (including the Mango DAO). At the time of recording this video, Mango DAO holds a fund balance of $871 million and 92 DAO proposals.
If you are optimistic about the DAO sector, then you can go to Mango DAO to check out some of the latest proposals. To give an example of what DAOs are on this platform: One current DAO is providing $1.5 million in funding to Mango Labs, which will be used to develop mobile applications, build more powerful market-making tools, and creative Mango v4.
According to Daffy, the creator of the DAO proposal, this DAO and Mango Labs, which is committed to decentralization and open source, can help Mango strengthen its censorship resistance.
Larch
The next project we’re going to talk about is the lending platform Larix, a financial protocol based on the Metaverse.
Larix offers services beyond typical loan pools and is the first protocol to offer automatically compounding mortgages. Its token symbol, LARIX, is priced at $0.007, and the total value locked is currently $135.6 million.
In 2022, Larix Protocol reached a cooperation with Solana’s decentralized exchange Soldex.ai, so what are the highlights of this cooperation? How important is it to Larix?
This collaboration will allow Larix and Soldex to work closely together for mutual benefit.
On the Soldex side, it will benefit from Larix’s existing exposure and market recognition; Soldex is the fastest third-generation decentralized exchange built on Solana and equipped with 24/7 machine learning. This means that even in the event of a market crash, the trading algorithm will not become emotional and remain neutral.
Orca
Orca is another top decentralized exchange built on Solana. Its massive transaction volume has earned it a spot on this list, with the total value locked up to an impressive $516.6 million.
Orca was founded in 2020 and went live in February 2021, with very little Solana infrastructure at the time. The project recently received $118 million in funding led by Three Arrows Capital. In addition to receiving strong capital support, Orca is also eye-catching because of its unique and beautiful design.
Orca positions itself as "people-centered and user-friendly" and the platform also has unique innovations such as the Fair Price Indicator and the Magic Wand, which provide users with rapid trading pair ranges with just one click.
Grace Kwan, co-founder of Orca, told the community that Orca’s human-centered design runs through the design of the entire official website. She interviewed and observed many encryption users and continuously improved the design based on their pain points in using existing products. The protocol’s whale logo was hand-drawn by the co-founders themselves, as they are both fans of scuba diving.
To know
Saber has had a huge impact on the Solana ecosystem by providing liquidity and allowing users to easily exchange between different stable asset pairs.
Saber provides liquidity for the likes of USDT/USD and SOL, and even Bitcoin uses this market maker as a cross-chain way to pool liquidity with other blockchains like Ethereum, Celo, BSC, and Terra bridging.
Fun fact about Saber: The original version was created by co-founder Dylan Macalinao as part of the first Solana hackathon, and was called "stable swap." Dylan served as a project manager at Okcoin and a product design lead at Pipe.
After its launch, Saber has quickly become one of the largest stablecoin exchanges in the Solana ecosystem and is very active in the communities on Twitter and Medium.
Tulip (formerly SolFarm)
The next project on the list is SolFarm (native token symbol Tulip), a DeFi app that raised $5 million to expand its offerings with lending investors like Jump Capital and Alameda Research.
Because the platform is built on the Solana blockchain, it takes advantage of low cost and high speed, so users don’t have to worry about gas fees and can fully earn competitive staking rewards.
Although ranked fourth on the list, SolFarm’s market cap was only $11 million at the time this video was recorded, with its token price well below its November 2021 high of $49.82.
The Solfarm team met over Discord back in 2017, and they have also collaborated on a number of smaller Ethereum projects. While SolFarm is not the only project they have been involved in, it is certainly the most successful.
Serum
In third place is Serum Dex. Serum Dex is the largest in terms of total value locked.
The creation process of this Dex itself is very interesting: Serum Foundations was created by FTX Alameda Research and a few other partners. The unique selling point of this decentralized exchange at the time was that it was co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX was recently crowned The world's youngest billionaire.
Obviously, decentralized exchanges running on the Solana blockchain have the advantages of being fast, cheap and permissionless. The main goal of the platform is to provide users with a wider range of prices using a decentralized order book operated by smart contracts. and order size, ultimately unleashing the ultimate power of trading.
The total value locked in Serum Dex is currently very close to $1 billion, at $959.9 million.
Raydium
The second most popular on the Solana network is Raydium, which has a total locked value of $1.05 billion and is the largest automated marketplace on the Serum DEX.
RAY tokens were issued relatively early, starting in February 2021. The price has reached a record high of $16.93, and the total user supply is 550 million.
Raydium allows users to earn, participate in creative ideas, and exchange tokens. The platform is beneficial to project parties, who can use it to act as a market maker, exchange and even raise funds to acquire new ideas or scale up to improve their business.
The team was founded by Alpha Ray, who was deeply involved in a variety of other DeFi projects and noticed flaws in the Ethereum network. The founders brainstormed ideas based on Serum and the concept of Raydium was born.
Solana
There is no doubt that Solana itself ranks first, with a total value locked of $54.6 billion.
While Solana achieves some impressive things, it's much more than that. Its main goal is to host scalable applications, so it makes sense that people often refer to Solana as the "Bolt" of cryptocurrency. Ethereum can process about 54 transactions per second, but Solana can handle up to 50,000 transactions per second, more than twice as fast as Visa transactions.
The reason for such impressive speed and scalability is the consensus behind Solana, which uses not Proof of Work or Proof of Stake, but a new concept of Proof of History (PoH).
For now, Solana shows a lot of promise, but it also comes with some challenges, although its speed and cost have always maintained its leading position in the industry.
But Solana still faces the problem of whether the network is stable enough. Compared with Ethereum, it is undoubtedly a fledgling calf, and there has been network instability in the past few months.
Among the ten projects mentioned above, which one are you most optimistic about? Welcome to communicate with me!