Overview of Solana Public Chain Ecosystem Projects

This article was published by the Blockchain Study Society.

Solana is a high-performance public blockchain founded by former engineers from Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox at the end of 2017, dedicated to building an internet-level blockchain network.

One of Solana's major features is its extremely high TPS, currently reaching over 50,000. Solana's current ecosystem partners include multiple projects such as Serum, Tether, USDc, Dfuse, Kin, Torus, Chainlink, Terra, Stardust, Arweave, Pocket, Audius, and more.

In the current Solana ecosystem, there are both mature products like Tether, USDc, Chainlink, and Terra that have already been established in other ecosystems, as well as Solana-native products like Serum, Raydium, and Oxygen.

The following image is the ecosystem map recently released by Solana. From the image, we can see that there are quite a few projects in the current Solana ecosystem, but most are concentrated in the infrastructure area, and the applications are primarily based on external mature applications, with relatively few native applications based on Solana. Overall, the infrastructure of the Solana ecosystem is still not very complete, but it is already capable of supporting the normal development of the Solana ecosystem.

Solana has recently gained significant momentum, with continuous activity within its ecosystem, attracting a lot of attention. This article briefly introduces some of the native products of the Solana ecosystem. Compared to already mature external applications, native products within a new ecosystem often contain more opportunities, but of course, there are also risks.

1. Serum

Serum is a decentralized exchange, a DeFi protocol launched by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of FTX exchange. Sam Bankman-Fried has a high level of recognition and influence in the industry, which also gives Serum an inherent advantage. Serum is a core product within the Solana ecosystem, and many protocols have been built around the Serum protocol, most of which are closely related to SBF.

We can see that many products have been built based on the Serum protocol, indicating the initial shape of the ecosystem.

Serum has two product forms: order book and AMM, combining the characteristics of both.

From the roadmap, it can be seen that Serum will also launch margin and contract services.

According to official data, the trading volume from April 2 to April 14 was $200 million, with a daily trading volume of around $16 million, ranking among the top fifteen DEXs on Ethereum.

2. Bonfida

Bonfida is the "flagship frontend" of Serum, providing a better trading experience for DEX trading. The services provided by Bonfida are as follows:

In addition to providing trading functions based on Serum, Bonfida also offers Serum API, strategy platform, Serum data analysis, and other features. Bonfida is also the first frontend to provide on-chain data analysis for Serum users. From the above image, Serum's trading volume in the last 7 days reached $150 million, with daily trading volume exceeding $20 million.

Bonfida also displays data on Serum and Bonfida tokens.

From the experience perspective, Bonfida is indeed much more user-friendly than Serum's native products.

Bonfida's strategy platform currently offers four to five strategies, allowing users to choose a strategy to deposit funds, which the platform will automatically execute. Currently, the amount of funds deposited on the platform is relatively small, indicating a smaller user base. According to official information, the platform will introduce KOLs to provide users with more diverse strategies, and users can also create their own strategies based on the platform.

Bonfida also launched the first NFT trading platform, Solible, which allows trading of digital collectibles on the Solana blockchain, though it doesn't seem particularly distinctive.

3. Raydium

Raydium's feature is that it can provide on-chain liquidity to the order book, meaning that Raydium's users and liquidity pools can access the entire order flow and liquidity of the Serum ecosystem, and vice versa. In the future, Raydium is expected to use other liquidity-providing models to leverage the advantages of oracle and enhance liquidity.

Raydium performs quite well in terms of pool depth and trading volume, of course, partly due to the incentives from mining.

Raydium's next move is to implement IDO functionality. Additionally, Raydium plans to combine several new lending protocols launched by Serum to enable margin trading functionality.

Raydium's roadmap is as follows:

4. Maps.me

Maps.me is an offline map application that has accumulated 140 million users, with Google Play showing over 50 million downloads of Maps.me.

As a mapping product, it provides various surrounding services within the app, such as hotel and restaurant bookings. Payments through third-party payment platforms incur high fees, and significant currency exchange losses can occur during international travel.

Maps.me recently completed a $50 million financing round and launched its platform token. Currently, Maps.me is developing its own multi-chain wallet and will launch a DeFi ecosystem on this offline mobile map platform. One of the tokens supported by the multi-chain wallet is USDC, created on Solana, enabling instant payments, especially suitable for travelers heading to remote areas lacking payment infrastructure.

Maps.me will integrate DeFi earnings into the wallet, providing users with passive income while attracting existing users through related services, and will offer more DeFi services to users in the future.

In the initial phase, the product providing DeFi services for Maps.me is the next one to be introduced: Oxygen.

5. Oxygen

Oxygen Protocol is a non-custodial decentralized brokerage protocol that helps users generate liquidity, earn yields, borrow to short assets, and obtain trading leverage for their asset portfolios.

In its early stages, Oxygen focuses on lending services, gradually adding various common investment banking services. Oxygen allows users to trade directly within the liquidity pool, simplifying the trading process. After the lending protocol, the next phase will create an OTC volatility trading platform and structured products, allowing developers to tailor structured products for themselves and users. The ultimate goal is to bring the main brokerage business, which only exists in investment banks, back to DeFi, making this service accessible to everyone.

Oxygen relies on Serum's price data to execute orders, market data, pricing, and risk management. Benefiting from the composability of DeFi, various participants on Serum can integrate and extend Oxygen's functionalities.

In the early stages, the Oxygen protocol will integrate with Maps.me to gain its users, who will earn yields from the wallet embedded in Maps.me. Maps.me users will not realize that the wallet they are using is a DeFi wallet, ensuring a very smooth user experience, making the wallet feel like using a traditional app wallet.

Currently, Oxygen is in its early stages, with only the iPhone app launched, providing basic functions such as deposits, transfers, and trading.

6. Solstarter

Solstarter is the first IDO platform on Solana, and the product has not yet been launched. From social media, Solstarter is quite popular, with numerous comments on each tweet.

Solstarter has not officially launched yet and has not announced specific details, but one main rule is that the more platform tokens you hold, the higher your IDO quota, which is similar to most IDO platforms.

7. Orca

Orca is one of the first 12 projects funded by the Solana Foundation, and it is an automated market maker (AMM) and aggregator platform. The Orca team is small, the product has officially launched, but no tokens have been issued yet. Orca defines itself as: a human-centered, non-programmatic DEX.

Orca aims to provide a simpler and more user-friendly experience for the Solana ecosystem. Specifically, Orca optimizes some usage details.

For example, when entering a transaction on Orca, the system checks whether the following two conditions are met:

• The price deviates from the market price on CoinGecko by within 1%
• The slippage is less than or equal to your set limit (default is 1%)

If the above conditions are met, you can proceed with the transaction with confidence. However, if either condition is not met, the system will pop up a "rate warning" or "slippage warning" prompt, as shown below:

Another reason Orca added the "Tokens" panel in the interface is to allow users to see the balances of all tokens listed on Orca, which will be updated in real-time based on transactions or provided liquidity.

8. Conclusion

Currently, there are not many native applications on Solana, but as the ecosystem develops, we will see more and more native applications emerge.

Recently, it has been common to see projects in the Solana ecosystem completing financing, as well as external projects announcing deployments based on Solana, indicating that the Solana ecosystem is continuously growing.

We look forward to a more vibrant Solana ecosystem, as the flourishing development of any ecosystem is beneficial for the industry.

Overview of project financing mentioned in the article:

DeFi exchange Serum completed a $20 million private placement financing in three days.

DEX platform Bonfida completed $4.5 million in seed round financing, led by CMS Holdings.

Offline travel app Maps.me raised $50 million in seed round financing, led by Alameda Research.

DeFi wholesale brokerage service provider Oxygen completed $40 million in financing, led by Alameda Research.

Solana IDO platform Solstarter received investment from DeFiance Capital.