Can Solana, with its ecological explosion, overturn Ethereum and become the king of public chains?

Author: Day; Source: Vernacular Blockchain 

Recently, due to the emergence of BOME, a wave of hype has been set off on Solana. In 27 pre-sales, more than 655,000 SOLs have been raised, and the activity on the chain has skyrocketed.

Source: https://analytics.step.finance

However, as the popularity has declined in the past few days and the market sentiment has weakened, most Memes have entered a high-opening and low-closing state, most of which are in a wave of flow, and very few can really run out.

Despite this, the subsequent development of Solana cannot be ignored. Some people even compare the development of this round of BTC ecology and Solana ecology with the previous round of ETH and BSC ecology development (there is a premise here, that is, it is still in the bull market stage, and the overall market will continue to rise). So, today, let's take a brief inventory of the Solana ecology.

 01 Why is Solana so popular?

Before reviewing the ecology, we need to briefly analyze why the Solana ecology is so popular.

• Internal reasons:

1) It has excellent performance, low cost, low latency and high throughput. Whenlarge traffic comes in, it can handle it.The essence of finance is trading. The real craze in the Crypto market is related to trading. As a platform, Solana continues to improve its speed and fluency in technology.
2) Solana itself performed well in this round, from a low of $8 to a high of $210, and its short-term market value broke through to the fourth place. Solana's rise has brought dividends to holders, and naturally some resources will flow to the ecosystem.
3) When the overall market heats up, Solana's ecosystem is not left behind, and they all have good performances. Inscriptions and Meme fever, representative projects have emerged.
4) Hot money continues to flow on the chain. After the copycat local dogs of Solana came out, there were many with market values ​​of over 10 million and 100 million. On the Ethereum side, the internal volume is severe. Although some of them have good concepts, their market values ​​are poor, and it is even difficult to reach 10 million. If Solana's chain is compared to a simple mode, then Ethereum's side is a hell mode.

• External reasons:

Ethereum is the most active chain on the chain. Although it has recently completed the Cancun upgrade, it has not improved the main chain at all. And because the market has improved recently, the more expensive the Ethereum price is, the higher the transaction cost on the chain is, which is daunting. The handling fee for a transaction is between tens and hundreds of dollars. In a round trip, 20% of the funds for the dog are gone, causing everyone to turn to other chains, and Solana is the biggest beneficiary.

Recently, the community has also been spreading emojis about Ethereum, which shows everyone's disappointment with Ethereum.

 02 Inventory of hot projects in the ecosystem

Solana is so popular now. I believe that at this point, the market will not end like this. Let's take stock of which projects in the Solana ecosystem are worth paying attention to. Screening criteria: those with a certain degree of popularity or those that are used more frequently. In addition, this industry prefers to speculate on new things rather than old ones, so the projects in the last round of bull and bear markets are skipped.

• Meme

The Meme track is an important track in this round of market. Some people think that this round of market is due to insufficient innovation, so it will turn to simple and crude Meme. Since this round of market, the Meme market has had at least three waves of popularity, one caused by Pepe, one caused by BRC20, and one caused by the SOL ecosystem.

Although the Meme of the SOL ecosystem has declined in popularity recently and is already in a mess, such as Pepe and BRC20, so far, they have already had two waves, so the Meme of the SOL ecosystem is still worth paying attention to. As for how to operate specifically, please study it yourself.

1) WIF

At the end of 2019, some KOLs on Twitter began to add various logos and images to woolen hats and used these pictures as their profiles on Twitter. Dogwifhat puts a woolen hat on a dog, and the image of a hat dog is created in this situation. The process of issuing tokens for the hat dog WIF is silent. The market shows that WIF opened at a price of $0.00016 on November 20, 2023, but the official first tweet was released on December 29. The creation of WIF and its current market value can be said to be a tepid state. When everyone paid attention to it, it had already risen.

2) Bonk

Bonk is the first dog project in the Solana ecosystem. The official conducted a large-scale Airdrop event on December 25, 2022, of which 50% was allocated to Solana community members, including holders of projects such as LamportDAO and Famous Fox Federation. The event aims to promote community interaction and reward participants. The purpose is to oppose the "Alameda"-style Token economics and restore confidence in the Solana ecosystem and SOL holders after the FTX incident. 3) Bome Artist Darkfarms launched a pre-sale event on March 13. Users can participate by sending SOL to the designated Solana address. Token allocation is determined by the proportion of donated SOL. After raising 10,131 SOL, Darkfarms added all SOL to the liquidity pool, which caused heated discussions in the market. In just three days, the market value soared from 4 million to 100 million, and BN was launched, which set off a chain boom in a short period of time.

4）Slerf

During the craze, SLERF was also one of them, but due to the operation error of the SLERF founder, 54583 SOL LP and Airdrop reserved tokens were destroyed. Because no one had tokens, SLERF was completely out of the control of the project party and completely decentralized, forming a new Meme concept, which was sought after by market users. Recently, the official is raising funds to compensate for the losses of users who participated in the interaction before. Although many CEXs have also launched donation activities, most of them are just for the sake of popularity and no substantial money is spent. The current donation activities are not ideal.

• Infrastructure

Similar to the explosion of BRC20 some time ago, and the recent Bitcoin ecological infrastructure, institutions have begun to invest in the Bitcoin ecosystem. The popularity of Solana Meme will inevitably extend to the entire Solana infrastructure.

1) Jupiter (dex)

Jupiter is a DEX aggregated on Solana. Its goal is to continuously optimize and update to enhance the user's trading experience and provide users with the best exchange rate. It achieves this goal by integrating major liquidity markets on Solana, such as Orca, Raydium, Serum, etc.
Jupiter launches its own native Token JUP and distributes the Token to community members through Airdrop and Token sales. Among them, 40% of JUP Tokens will be distributed to approximately 955,000 eligible users in the Jupiter Exchange community through Airdrop. Another 20% will be distributed through Token sales, and the remaining 40% will be reserved for internal personnel and strategic reserves.

As of March 24, Jupiter's total transaction volume exceeded US$120 billion, accounting for more than 80% of Solana DEX's organic transaction volume, making it the preferred trading platform on Solana.

https://station.jup.ag

2) Pyth Network (Oracle)

Pyth Network is the oracle on Solana. Pyth Network obtains financial market data by connecting to more than 350 information sources (including major CEX/DEX and market makers such as BN, OKX, Bybit, etc.) and transmits this data to 45+ blockchains, providing users with real-time market prices and financial data.
In addition, Pyth Network supports more than 230 applications, including DEX, borrowing agreements, and derivatives platforms. Its infrastructure can achieve more than 65 million updates per day, improving the accuracy and security of smart contract operations.

Pyth Network has completed three rounds of financing, with investment institutions including Delphi digital, KuCoin Labs, etc., and also received 40,000 OP grants from the OP Foundation. Among them, the members of the Pyth Data Association include heavyweight institutions on Wall Street, such as Jump, SBF's former owner Jane Street Capital, SIG and market maker Virtu Financial.

3) Helium Mobile (Depin)

Helium Mobile is a decentralized 5G operator. Helium Mobile uses Token Mobile incentives to encourage individuals to purchase router hotspot devices (Hostpot) and deploy these hotspots in various indoor and outdoor environments to establish a decentralized wireless network. This model can reduce costs, expand coverage and reduce user fees.

To put it simply, it is similar to mining kuang. First, you pay $20 per month to purchase the service, and then receive token rewards while providing map data every day.

Currently, the number of Helium Mobile users has exceeded 70k.

4) iot.net (Depin+AI)

io.net is a cloud computing project that provides a decentralized GPU network to solve the AI ​​computing shortage problem, aiming to provide users with high-performance, cost-effective computing power, and simplify the management and utilization of GPU resources.

io.net leverages GPU resources worldwide and deploys and utilizes them with simple clicks. It provides high-performance computing power that can be used to build distributed GPU networks, perform inference and model serving workflows, and supports distributed computing libraries to orchestrate and batch training jobs.

In addition, io.net supports cluster deployment on decentralized physical infrastructure networks and provides fast and secure Solana on-chain payments. The platform also provides a fair pricing mechanism and the ability to convert GPUs into revenue, allowing users to rent out their GPU resources and earn revenue.

In March of this year, io.net announced the completion of a $30 million Series A financing round, with participation from Solana Labs, Mult1C0in Capital, Animoca Brands and other institutions.

5) Magic Eden (NFT Market)

Magic Eden is the largest NFT market on Solana. Currently, it supports the NFT markets of Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Polygon. As an early supporter of Bitcoin NFT, Magic Eden reaped a wave of market dividends during the outbreak of the Bitcoin ecosystem last year.

Magic Eden has launched a "reward plan" where users can get diamond rewards for participating in market transactions, and the subsequent issuance of tokens should be linked to diamonds. In addition, Magic Eden has also recently launched its own wallet.

MagicEden has completed three rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of over 170 million US dollars. Investment institutions include Coinbase, Sequoia Capital, Polygon Ventures, Paradigm, etc.

NFT market transaction volume share, source: https://dune.com

6) Backpack Ecosystem

Backpack is a CEX/DEX and multi-chain wallet created by the Coral team, the developer of the Solana development framework Anchor.The project was initiated by former FTX executives, and thanks to its relationship with FTX executives, the platform obtained a license issued by the Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA), allowing the company to provide crypto services to qualified investors and institutional clients in Dubai. At present, BackPack has launched three products, namely Backpack CEX, Backpack Wallet and MadLads NFT project.

Among them, Mad Lads is an NFT with an executable script, which was released by the team in April 2023 and sold for 6.9 SOL at the time.It has now become the NFT leader of the SOL ecosystem. This NFT can be compared to a golden shovel and has received several waves of Airdrop.

Backpack completed 2 rounds of financing with a total amount of US$37 million. Investment institutions include FTX, Jump Crypto, Amber Group, Wintermute and Solana founders.

7) Solana Mobile Saga

Solana's first mobile phone Saga can be empowered by Airdrop for free, allowing the first wave of people who eat crabs to make a lot of money. The official development team Solana Mobile plans to launch the second-generation encrypted mobile phone in the first half of 2025, and pre-sale will start at the end of 2023. The pre-sale is divided into three stages, each more expensive than the last. The price of the first stage is US$450 and the price of the second stage is US$500. So far, 118,000 units have been sold, and early participants have received Airdrops worth about US$100.

 03 Summary

The above is an inventory of the Solana ecosystem. Do you think that after the Solana Meme craze, will the heat transition to the infrastructure of the Solana ecosystem? Welcome to leave a message to share your views.