Solana In-Depth — Which projects should you look for within the Ecosystem
2021 has been a stellar year for Solana. The blockchain emerged as a new promising contender in the race to become the leading DeFi network and cemented its position as a top 5 cryptocurrency by size.
Still the fastest blockchain network, with the capacity to perform 50,000 transactions per second for a fraction of its main competitors’ prices, Solana has become the main project to look out for within the entire DeFi landscape and, as expected, the Solana Ecosystem became a vibrant hub of innovation.
In today’s post, we’ll round up some of our favorite projects within the Solana landscape. From Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) to NFT marketplaces, Yield Aggregators and even Multiplayer Online games, the SOL ecosystem is rapidly becoming the go-to environment for upcoming projects to build on.
Our 5 choices
The Solana Ecosystem has already seen over 300 projects of all kinds come to life. On our list, however, we chose to focus on 5 of the projects we feel are the most promising ventures within Solana.
1. Serum
Project Serum is a protocol for decentralized exchanges. The noncustodial, decentralized exchange (DEX) captures the best of CeFi and DeFi through its on-chain order book design and it is rapidly becoming a major infrastructure for the Solana ecosystem.
Created by Alameda Research and FTX, the exchange quickly gained notoriety for its transaction speed and low fees, bringing the speed and convenience of centralized exchanges to DeFi while remaining fully trustless and transparent.
Serum shares its liquidity and price-time-priority matching with Ecosystem partners (like Raydium), allowing users to benefit from this model by choosing the size, direction, and price of their trades. At the same time, partner projects benefit from Serum’s liquidity and matching service.
SRM is the utility and governance token of the Serum ecosystem, and it will be fully integrated into Serum to benefit from buy/burn of fees.
2. Star Atlas
Star Atlas is definitely one of the most ambitious projects from the thriving Solana ecosystem. It is an online blockchain multiplayer game entirely built on the Solana network and designed as an open economy, in which players can explore massive areas and earn ATLAS tokens while playing.
The Star Atlas project describes the project as a “strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest, political domination, and more”. It is set in the future, in 2620, in a Universe divided into 3 factions players can choose from: humans, androids, and aliens.
Star Atlas was developed as a massive universe of opportunities for its player and it relies on a dual-token economy, $ATLAS is the in-game currency and $POLIS will be used as the governance token of the Star Atlas DAO.
For now, the game is still going through development stages and only a few features are available to users, but it already shows promise of becoming a flagship project for the Solana ecosystem.
Mango Markets is a DeFi derivatives platform and it claims to have the lowest fees in the entire Solana Ecosystem.
It not only offers spot margined and leveraged perpetual futures markets but also hosts collateralized loans against existing assets, all in one friendly, easy-to-use platform.
The platform offers spot margined markets with up to 5x leverage and perpetual futures markets with up to 10x leverage and claims to have more advanced order types coming soon
Mango stepped into the scene with the goal of offering its users the liquidity and usability of centralized exchanges while benefiting from the permissionless nature of DeFi.
Its native token, MNGO is a governance token and represents voting rights for the platform’s governance.
Learn more about Mango Markets.
A non-custodial digital wallet specifically designed for DeFi and NFTs. Phantom wallet creates a browser extension from which you can manage all your digital assets and access Dapps within Solana.
It features ledger and web3 support, direct staking mechanisms and a built-in DEX and all of it wrapped within a very friendly platform, often described by its users as the best wallet on Solana, possibly even the best blockchain wallet available!
Learn more about Phantom Wallet.
5. Orca
ORCA is an automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX). This Solana-built DEX was designed to provide its users with a “human-centered DEX”. The Orca team prides itself on designing for people, not programs and it specialized in creating a human-centered digital experience.
The DEX leverages Solana’s leading capacities of 400ms block times, 50,000 TPS, and $0.001 average transaction fees to offer its users a “Blazing-fast speed, nearly-zero fees” trading experience.
As of now, Orca’s main features are a Token Swap, Liquidity Pools, and Yield Farms, however, the young project is working on upcoming developments and has already announced the launch of new functionalities such as the integration of Wormhole, the cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Solana, collectible, valueless tokens for early adopters, new analytics for price, liquidity, volume and fees, and more.
Closing thoughts
Solana is undeniably becoming the go-to place for upcoming crypto projects, the blockchain’s unmatched technical capabilities are making it possible for more and more projects to offer its users the best possible conditions for trading, staking, or even blockchain gaming.
About Solanax
Solanax is a Solana-based automated market maker (AMM) exchange providing lightning-fast trades, pooled liquidity, and other income-generating features. Solana was chosen as the underlying blockchain to facilitate low-cost, high-speed transactions. It is a permissionless, high-performance blockchain based on the Proof of History consensus (PoH).
Given the advantages that Solana offers when compared to other blockchain ecosystems, it is a popular solution among investors, users, and developers. Ethereum’s Proof of Work Consensus is slow, hard to scale, and comes with high gas fees which were exacerbated by its account-based system. Where Ethereum has failed to live up to the community expe, Solana quickly proves to be a viable alternative.
Solanax will utilize the cross-bridge Wormhole to connect to projects and digital assets existing on the Ethereum blockchain, facilitating adoption and allowing the crypto community to seamlessly move tokenized assets from one blockchain to another, improving interoperability and liquidity setup.
It is faster and cheaper; Solanax offers on-chain liquidity; traders will have more control over their trading activities; an integration of Wormhole for fusion with tokenized assets on the Ethereum blockchain, and much more.
For more details on the project at the forefront of the DeFi evolution, visit:
Website | Twitter | Telegram | White paper
