In-depth Analysis of Solana Ecosystem Projects: Potential and Opportunities Coexist

Recently, the cryptocurrency market has undergone a round of adjustments, providing investors with opportunities to position themselves in undervalued potential projects. As two major ecosystems that have garnered significant attention in this bull market, the rapid development and capital attraction effects of Solana and TON have made them focal points for many investors.

The Solana ecosystem is more mature compared to TON, with significant advantages in innovation capability and large-scale adoption. With the upcoming launch of the Ethereum ETF, an asset management company has also submitted a Solana ETF application to regulators, marking Solana's beginning to attract the attention of traditional capital. Industry insiders believe that the combination of Solana's high throughput, low fees, strong security, and active community makes it an ideal choice for exchange-traded funds.

The Potential of the Solana Ecosystem

On a technical level, the launch of Solana Blinks and Solana Actions has significantly lowered the barriers for developers to use the Solana blockchain. This will drive the application of Solana in areas such as DeFi, NFT markets, gaming, DAO governance, and RWA, facilitating more Web2 users to conveniently use Web3 technology. For Solana ecosystem projects, this is an important opportunity to acquire more users and adoption.

Next, we will explore several projects in the Solana ecosystem that are worth paying attention to this year.

Drift Protocol

Drift Protocol integrates RWA and DeFi, providing users with a diversified set of DeFi products and experiences. Recently, the protocol announced a partnership with a financial company to support multiple RWA assets as collateral for traders, becoming one of the most widely supported protocols for mainstream RWA assets on the Solana chain.

The advantages of Drift Protocol lie in its product diversification, including derivatives trading, swaps, leveraged spot trading, and lending. With the low gas fees and fast confirmation features of Solana, Drift Protocol provides users with extremely low transaction fees and a trading experience close to that of centralized exchanges while ensuring profitability.

Another core advantage is the rapid response and support for the ecosystem. Drift offers pre-market trading and a fast listing channel, allowing hot assets in the ecosystem to be quickly traded on the platform, providing investors with more trading strategies and choices.

Drift's TVL has rapidly grown from $117 million to a peak of $385 million this year, an increase of 3.3 times. The cumulative trading volume has reached $32 billion, with a recent 24-hour trading volume of approximately $220 million and active users totaling 190,000.

a DEX aggregator

This is the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, which helps users automatically select the best trading path by aggregating liquidity from multiple decentralized exchanges, minimizing swap trading slippage and transaction fees. Its daily trading volume once exceeded that of a well-known DEX, making it number one across the entire chain.

In addition to the advantages of being fast, low-cost, and permissionless, the platform also offers services such as scheduled automated investments, cross-chain bridges, perpetual contract trading, and project launches.

At the beginning of this year, the platform airdropped tokens to over 100,000 community users, becoming the largest airdrop event on Solana. Recently, it also airdropped $60 million worth of cryptocurrency to users who actively staked tokens and participated in DAO voting.

Kamino

Kamino is a DeFi project for lending and providing liquidity, offering users collateralized loans and controlling the availability of borrowed funds through the use of CLMM (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker). The project also provides an automatic deleveraging mechanism and a "protected collateral" feature to shield assets from the risk of borrower default.

Currently, investors can pay attention to the second phase airdrop of Kamino, as providing stablecoins for the protocol is a relatively stable strategy. Among them, the stablecoin launched by a certain payment giant offers an annual yield of up to 18.39% on Kamino, along with a 3x points reward.

As of early July, the TVL on the Kamino chain reached $1.06 billion, an increase of 6.5 times compared to the beginning of the year.

Jito

Jito is a liquid staking protocol launched in 2022, where users can stake SOL to receive JitoSOL, and the staking rewards are directly accumulated into JitoSOL. Jito also offers users a Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) feature, and the MEV rewards will also be distributed to JitoSOL, which relatively increases the returns.

Currently, Jito's TVL has reached $1.59 billion, growing 2.5 times since the beginning of the year. The protocol fees in 24 hours amount to $730,000, with cumulative fees reaching $150 million, and the number of users has exceeded 100,000.

TipLinks

TipLinks is a lightweight wallet product that is similar in functionality to the Blinks feature recently launched by Solana. Users can create TipLinks and send the links to others via any platform (SMS, social media, email, etc.).

Using TipLinks, you can complete complex crypto transactions with just a common email account. By clicking the link, you can easily send crypto assets, even to non-crypto users. The emergence of TipLinks and Blinks technology has broken down the barriers between Web2 and Web3, providing a seamless crypto payment experience for new crypto users and laying the foundation for the mass adoption of Web3.

Summary

From on-chain data, Drift Protocol leads in user numbers, and its daily revenue is also relatively high. The project products cover a wide range, including lending, spot trading, leveraged trading, and contract trading in the DeFi space. Drift has a relative advantage in integrating with the Solana ecosystem, which will bring more flexibility to Solana DeFi users' assets and further enhance Drift's competitiveness.

Jito and Kamino have garnered over $1 billion in locked value, becoming projects of significant interest to investors. Jito's MEV provides users with additional income, and jitoSOL has also become a highly proportionate staking token within the Solana ecosystem. Kamino boasts numerous innovations in lending, with user demand for borrowing relatively increasing during a bull market.

A certain DEX aggregator has achieved a high TVL growth rate, which is partly attributed to the trading quote advantages brought by its aggregated liquidity, and partly related to its airdrop expectations.

From the current development status, Jito and a certain DEX aggregator are projects with high capital attention on Solana. Drift Protocol has the highest TVL growth rate by increasing the variety of collateral, aggregating liquidity, and innovatively combining RWA assets with DeFi. The combination of RWA and DeFi on Solana will have greater imaginative space in a bull market, while creating more value for users and adding new features to DeFi. Therefore, Drift Protocol will also have greater explosive power and development prospects.

TipLinks provides the possibility for further popularization of cryptocurrency and has explosive potential. It remains to be seen in the future whether it can withstand market tests in terms of security, usability, and composability.

Compared to the previous bull market ecosystem, this round of the bull market has seen a batch of rapidly growing popular projects on Solana, covering tracks such as DEX, Liquid Staking, Lending, NFT, and RWA. In addition to technological innovation, Solana's ecological projects also demonstrate strong capital and user attraction, as well as potential innovative capabilities. The TVL growth rate of ecological projects is generally over 2 times, with the number of users reaching hundreds of thousands, which to some extent showcases the innovative potential of Solana DeFi and its growth prospects in this round of the bull market.