The performance of Solana in 2021 has been astonishing. Unless you’ve been living under a rock there’s no way that Solana’s rapid growth has gone unnoticed to you. Not only has the price of Solana risen, the whole ecosystem has seen massive developments. I have to say looking into it has been a thrill and there are so many projects that I could have included in this list. The speed and low-cost offered by Solana have made it a great place for many projects to build and this is just the beginning. In this article I’ll take a look at some of them. As said, there were so many good projects, I could have picked many more but since this is not meant to become a 200-page book I had to narrow it down to these five. I tried to pick projects with a different use case to show how broad the ecosystem is and provide you with a few things for everyday use.
1. Serum
Since I mentioned Serum in the previous section it’s only fair to cover it next. Serum is a DEX and provides the back end for multiple products on Solana. Serum enables projects to build applications using the Serum on-chain central liquidity pools. Using Serum’s order book guarantees great liquidity, low-costs, and speed. On top of that it allows developers to share middleware, which is extremely helpful.
Serum isn’t anything you’re going to use directly. Instead, it’s the ecosystem powering many of the projects you’ll use. These include the afore mentioned Raydium as well as Mango Markets, Oxygen, Star Atlas, Solrise Finance and many more. Why Serum has managed to become so successful might have something to do with its creator. The person behind the project is FTX exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Serum also has investments from many big names including Alameda Research, and Multicoin Capital. Nowadays Serum is governed by its own token SRM and a DAO.
2. Star Atlas
This is a project that I’m not going to go too much into detail on since we’ve already covered it in depth in our great article on blockchain gaming gems. However, since I’m someone who prefers to play some video games when taking a break from crypto rather than watching Netflix, I got really excited when reading about this project. Long story short, Star Atlas will be a game incorporating all the benefits of crypto and NFTs to create a full digital ecosystem where you’ll be able to choose your path and play like it’s your real life.
Why I said “going to be” is because currently it looks like the full game launch is years away. However, to make the waiting more pleasant they will be launching the game in small pieces which will enable you to play some parts of the game and maybe get a head start on others. Also, you can already trade both the Star Atlas token as well as Polis which is going the be the governance token, and even some in-game items as NFTs.
Hopefully, this project will live up to expectations since a game like this would not only revolutionize blockchain gaming but gaming in general. There’re even rumors that when battling in the game you can lose your battle ships or other loot as they will be NFTs. Also, if you look at the trailer I linked to you’ll see that the graphics and the feel of the game is honestly one of the best I’ve ever seen. So, if you’re a fan of games I suggest you keep an eye on this project and try to get gaming early since I believe Star Atlas has some insane potential if they can live up to expectations.
3. Tulip Protocol
After losing all your battleships in the Star Atlas universe it might be wise to come back to the ground and look for some income possibilities. For this yield aggregators might come in handy. Tulip Protocol is the yield aggregator on Solana with the highest TVL at just over $800 million according to DeFi Llama. Tulip has partnered with Solana Foundation, Raydium and Serum.
Tulip offers vaults and pools from three different protocols that are from Raydium, Orca, and Saber. The yields here are good and astronomical if you go for leveraged yield farming. BUT, as always when you hear the word leverage you need to be careful although it says that the highest APY is 8000% you can’t be entering without knowing what you’re doing. So, this introduction to Tulip was quite short but those that are into yield farming I would suggest Tulip as the go to place on Solana.
4. Bonfida
Here’s another project built using the Serum DEX. Bonfida advertises itself as the graphical user interface of Serum. Bonfida allows trading using Serum, trading bots, perpetual swaps, name service, and an API to get access to data from Serum. This project is backed by some heavy names including Alameda Research and Three Arrows Capital. They have a daily transaction volume of about $70 million and an all-time volume of $12 billion.
I picked this project because I think some of you might be interested in the trading bots and also the naming service. When entering the trading bot site, you can find a few existing strategies and also see their performance. For those who like to create their own bots that should be easy since Bonfida supports TradingView. The naming service might be interesting, especially after the ENS airdrop. However, don’t expect a similar since Bonfida already has its native token which I’ll talk about in the next section. If you like the Solana ecosystem and want a custom domain, then to my understanding Bonfida is the go-to place.
As mentioned, Bonfida has its native toke called Fida. Fida is used for governance as well as staking. Staking rewards will come when Fida fees are collected and then burned. More clearly explained, all fees gathered will go to a pool which can only do two things, buy Fida and burn Fida. I’m not completely aware how this works but essentially anyone can choose to burn Fida when there’s available Fida in the pool and of that burnt Fida 10% will go to stakers. When staking Fida you’ll also gain access to the API as well as advanced analytics.
5. Audius
If Solana is dubbed the Ethereum killer, then here you have the Spotify killer. Audius is a decentralized streaming platform for musicians. Audius has incorporated a social media style approach and allows anyone to post music to start gaining an audience and interact with them. Audius is powered by the AUDIO token that has a market cap of almost $900 million at the time of writing. According to the Audius dashboard they have over 6 million unique users this month, up from just 1.8 million a year ago.
What makes Audius unique from anything we’ve ever seen is its creator friendliness. You might have read about how poorly artists on Spotify get compensated for their work. This isn’t a problem on Audius since artists can set their own payment model. It can be a subscription, one-time fee, or a combination of both. You can soon even set restrictions that your music can only be heard at a certain altitude or location, anything is possible. Then we’ve got the whole NFT side which makes up more opportunities to further engage the fanbase through Audius.
Final Word
There’s no doubt that Solana is a real competitor to Ethereum. When doing research for this article I came across so many interesting projects that could have been mentioned in this piece. As I mentioned in the beginning, what I tried to do was pick projects from different sectors and with different use cases. That’s why I can’t guarantee you that these are the “best” projects but they are good projects. Some projects left out of this list which if you’re interested in the Solana ecosystem are worth checking out are: Oxygen, Orca, Solrise Finance, Mango Markets, and to be real, many more.
