Solana Ecosystem (SOL) - Everything you need to know to Skin In The Game with Solana
Description of Solana Ecosystem (SOL) - Everything you need to know to Skin In The Game with Solana
Get an overview of Solana and each piece of the puzzle inside the SOL ecosystem, to set the stage for finding opportunities in Solana.
Solana is one of the fastest growing smart contract platforms in Crypto. In just over a year, from an ecosystem where the number of development projects is counted on the fingers, Solana has made a spectacular transformation with hundreds of projects and become one of the most attractive places for both users, investors and developers.
The following article will give you the necessary information to understand Solana, draw an overview of the entire ecosystem, thereby serving as a premise for finding opportunities in Solana and a yardstick for comparison. with other ecosystems.
Overview of Solana
Solana is a high performance Smart Contract Platform. Solana introduces many new and unique technologies, to provide users with high transaction speed and security, with the ability to scale up to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second through hardware upgrades.
Four highlights of Solana compared to other ecosystems.
- High throughput : Network can support 50,000 TPS, can be easily scaled through the lifting of Validators hardware, there are more than 600 Validators globally.
- Low latency : About 1 second (average falls between 600ms - 800ms).
- Very cheap transaction fees: The average fee per transaction is around 0.00005 SOL (about $0.0013 when SOL reaches $26).
- Programming language : RUST, this is a highly appreciated programming language in recent years. In addition, Solana also supports C, C++ and Libra's Move.
Solana's technology overview
8 Solana Tech Highlights.
To achieve the same performance as above Solana has combined many unique features together, here are the 8 features that the Solana family recommends:
Proof of History (POH)
With legacy systems, one of the limitations to scalability was the time it took to reach consensus on the order of transactions. With POH on Solana, it helps to create a record that proves that an event happened at a specific time, which allows transactions to be ordered automatically.
Based on POH, a single “Leader” (similar to a Bitcoin Miner ) receives and writes transactions to the network as quickly as possible. Of course, these “Leaders” will be changed regularly.
The biggest limitation here is the hardware speed of the “Leader”, the faster the hardware, the faster the Solana network.
Tower BFT
Solana runs a consensus mechanism called Tower BFT (Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance). It is a PBFT-like algorithm, designed to take advantage of POH.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (or Byzantine Fault Tolerance System - BFT) is a system that can solve the problem of the Byzantine problem. This means that the BFT system can continue to function even if some nodes fail or take actions that harm the overall network.
Turbine
Turbine is a Blockchain communication protocol, it is inspired by BitTorrent , to solve the problem "increasing the number of Nodes will increase the amount of time it takes to transmit all the data to all the Nodes."
With Turbine, if a Node wants to transmit a large message to many different peers, it will not send the same data multiple times, but the Turbine protocol will divide the data into smaller pieces for faster processing. .
Gulf Stream
The mempool is a waiting area for transactions before they are selected to move to the next block. In Ethereum, the mempool is used to give miners the opportunity to choose the highest paying transactions to process first.
Gulf Stream eliminates this concept, making transaction processing faster.
Sealevel
Sealevel is a parallel transaction processing engine designed to scale horizontally across GPUs and SSDs.
Pipelining
Pipeline is a custom virtual machine that uses LLVM to compile code for GPUs for parallel transaction execution. This allows Solana to process thousands of concurrent transactions on the GPU.
Cloudbreak
Because Solana is so fast, it needs a new Disk I/O database structure to avoid bottlenecks. Cloudbreak is Solana's solution to this problem.
It allows the system to read and write data at the same time. Cloudbreak works in tandem with the Pipelining and Archivers protocols.
Archivers
In Solana, data storage is separated from the validation process to a network of specialized Nodes called Archivers. Archivers did not participate in the consensus. The data will be decomposed into fragments and encrypted, The Archivers only store those fragments. The Network will frequently ask Archivers to prove that they are archiving the data, which they have to.
In short, with its technological breakthroughs, Solana is one of the most modern Crypto infrastructures, one of the few blockchains that is qualified to bring Crypto to mass adoption.
Next we will go to learn about the pieces on Solana to see how much the ecosystem has developed.
Solana Ecosystem Overview (SOL)
DeFi on Solana
Surely you are no stranger to DeFi , many people call DeFi a trend, some see this as the future, but it is undeniable that DeFi is developing at a dizzying pace.
Keeping up with the pace of development and further into mass adoption will require an infrastructure that can meet the growing demands of DeFi. Solana is a blockchain that delivers those basic conditions. Let's have an overview of DeFi on Solana.
Solana is now almost full of DeFi foundation pieces, currently the ecosystem is focusing on developing higher-tier pieces and projects tend to develop many satellite projects around the project. The main project to optimize the yield source for users.
Learn more: Solana's DeFi Ecosystem
Stablecoins
Stablecoins are Crypto's gateway:
- What is the first thing you need to do to participate in Crypto? ⇒ Buy USDT, USDC,... from fiat exchanges ⇔ Crypto or from OTC parties.
- When you bought a token to take profit or cut your loss, where will you swap that token? ⇒ Stablecoins.
Therefore, stablecoins are the gateway for users to enter Crypto, and also one of the useful metrics to assess whether money is flowing into the ecosystem or not.
There are currently 4.79 billion USDC and 1.89 billion USDT issued on Solana.
DEX
AMM
When we have stablecoins and want to buy tokens, we will go to DEXs or CEXs to buy, and when we take profits we also need to go to these exchanges to sell. With DeFi, the DEX is the source of liquidity and a common market for users to trade tokens.
There are two main Dex models: AMM and Order-book:
1. Typical AMM projects:
- Common AMM models: Raydium, Orca, Saros Finance , SenSwap.
- Model AMM for stable assets: Mercurial Finance, Saber.
Besides, there are projects with special designs such as Cyclos with designs to help focus liquidity,...
2. Typical Order-book projects
Serum is Solana's most prominent DEX Order-book. If you have read the article about the foundation of Serum , you must have seen the great vision and ambition that Serum is trying to accomplish. Serum is not just an ordinary DEX Order-book but also a common pool for the entire project developed on it.
In addition to Serum, a few other DEX orderbook exchanges also give good user experiences such as Dexlab, SolApe and Aldrin.
Lending & Borrowing
Borrowing and lending ( Lending & Borrowing ) is a lifelong need. Once users get their tokens, they won't just want to sit around and hold. Instead they will want to generate additional income from their assets and from there the need to borrow and lend arises.
The Lending & Borrowing segment is the segment with the most spectacular changes in recent times. There have been many projects releasing products and starting to attract users, besides there are many other projects that already have devnets and are likely to launch in the near future.
Overview of Lending projects on Solana:
- Debt Protocol (model similar to Maker): Parrot.
- Money market (Model tương tự Aave, Compound): Port Finance, Solend, Larix, Apricot Finance, Jet Protocol, Acumen, Everlend, Zero Interest, Solaris.
- Lending P2P: Oxygen.
Derivative
Once profitable, we look for opportunities to increase profits even further, hence the derivatives market . Derivative is an array that receives a lot of attention in the Solana system when branches such as options, margin trading, prediction, index, .. all have projects in their names.
Notable derivative projects:
- Margin Trading: Mango Market.
- Synthetic Assets: Synthetify.
- Index: Symmetry.
- Perpetual: Drift Protocol.
- Options: PsyOptions, Zeta Markets, Unk Finance, 01
- Prediction: HedgeHog.
Aggregator & Asset Management
This is the top layer of DeFi, the purpose of Aggregator is to help users combine the benefits of multiple protocols at the lower layers on one dapps.
The purpose of Asset management helps users manage all their assets and positions on a single interface, or entrust their assets to another party to manage.
1. Aggregator
Aggregator has two main types, Dex Aggregator ( Coin98 Exchange , 1Inch ) and Yield Aggregator ( Yearn ).
- Typical yield aggregator projects include: Solfarm, Sunny, Solyard, Francium.
- Typical dex aggregator projects include: Jupiter aggregator, Prism.
2. Asset Management
The most prominent Asset Management project on Solana is Solrise Finance , a project that has launched a product but is going quite slowly recently.
NFT
Although there are many mixed views on NFT , it is undeniable that NFT is growing and attracting more participants, both Crypto and non-Crypto.
Below is an overview of the current NFT puzzle pieces on Solana:
Marketplace
Similar to the importance of DEXs to DeFi, NFTs are just tokens by nature, so a marketplace would be needed to trade those tokens.
Solana marketplace projects:
- Permissioned Marketplace (Need to register to be listed): Solanart, DigitalEyes, Magic Eden.
- Permissionless Marketplace (No registration required to get a listing): Solsea.
There are also other projects with different mechanisms such as Burnt Finance with NFT auction mechanism, NFracTion with NFT fragmentation mechanism, Banksea Finance with NFT lending,...
Gaming
The best game projects on Solana can be mentioned as: Star Atlas, Project Seed, Aurory, OpenErra.
Besides, there are many other potential game projects being developed in the ecosystem.
Tools
Tools are an essential part of learning and experiencing the ecosystem. And in the section below, I will list the best tools to help you fight the Solana system.
- Wallet: Wallet is an indispensable part when participating in Crypto in general, storing and transferring assets is one of the basic needs of users. The current best wallet products for Solana system include: Coin98 Wallet , Phantom, Solet, Solflare.
- Explorer: Similar to Ethereum with Etherscan, BSC has Bscan, users need a place to view transaction information on Solana. The most prominent explorers on Solana currently include: Solana Beach, Solana explorer, Solscan
- Dashboard: Daily users experience a lot of tasks with many different projects. For example: Farm on Saber , Trade Margin on Mango , buy different NFTs,... So how can we manage them all without missing important information ⇒ Dashboard helps solve this problem . The best Solana dashboard projects currently include: Step Finance, Sonar, ApeBoard.
Others
In addition to the above branches, we have many other pieces with different functions on Solana that we should pay attention to, including:
- Oracle: Pyth Network, Switchboard.
- Unlock Liquidity: Marinade Finance, Socean.
- Launchpad: AcceleRaytor, Solanium, Solstater.
- DeFi x NFT: DeFi Land.
- Infrastructure: All Art, Metaplex.
- Social: Only1.
- Music : Audius.
Epilogue
The above is the general information and resources that you need to know in the process of learning about Solana. Overall, the ecosystem has undergone dramatic changes in a short period of time, and as the ecosystem continues to perfect its pieces, we can look forward to Solana's next wave.
If you are a hard fan of Solana, don't forget to follow the Solana Ecosystem column to get the fastest updates on all Solana's weekly highlights and events, along with the author's comments to provide. give you the most objective view of those updates!
Disclaimer: All information in this article is for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered investment advice. Investing in cryptocurrencies involves extremely high risk and you should only invest the amount that you are willing to lose.
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