Solana has drawn lots of attentions during the past one year, and its ecosystem keeps growing rapidly. Many DeFi users continuously flow into Solana because Solana chain provides pretty low gas, high transaction speed as well as abundant ecosystems.

The following paragraphs briefly outline some of great Solana projects that I personally in favor. It is not a complete overview of Solana. However, for those who are interested in diving into Solana, it might be a good start. 

• Wallet

Solana is not an EVM-compatible chain, which means you cannot use your Ethereum-based wallets such as Metamask to visit Solana Dapps.

There are a couple of Solana wallets available. For browser wallet extensions, Sollet and Phantom are probably most popular. But when it comes to user experience, Phantom wallet looks better as tokens are well organized. For App wallets, you may consider Slope or Fantom, although Fantom currently supports iOS version only.

• DEX

Most DEXes are AMM DEXes similar to other blockchain networks. But nowadays we see more and more projects have order books just like CEXes. Raydium is a well-known Solana DEX which offers both swap feature and limit order.

Saber is a unique DEX which focuses on stablecoins exchange. In particular, it supports many types of cross-chain stablecoin assets.

• Trading

The advantages of high speed and low gas make Solana very suitable for spot and margin trading, which are carried out in the form of order book. For instance, 01 and Drift Protocol are Solana-based decentralized trading platforms focusing on Perpetuals.

• Lending

Typical lending protocols such as Solend, Larix are popular Solana projects for DeFi users to supply and borrow assets.

• Yield Farming / Yield Aggregator

Yield farming is a common way for DeFi users to provide liquidity in exchange for reward. Many Dapps also combine DEXes and Farms in one single platform. For example, Raydium and Orca are DEXes with yield farming functions on Solana.

Moreover, another type of yield farming projects does not have its own liquidity but take advantage of other yield from outer projects, and then reward their investors who deposit outer yield’s LP into their platform. Normally the rewards are in the form of its native tokens, and these types of yield are known as yield aggregator. Two typical yield aggregators on Solana are Sunny Aggregator and Tulip.

• Leveraged Yield Farming

The development of yield farming economic model is amazing. To combine liquidity mining with leverage leads to an innovative method called leverage yield farming. Francium is a representative Solana project aiming at this approach. It allows users to deposit assets and open position simultaneously up to 3X. In other words, if users deposit tokens valued 100 USD to the selected farm, he could open up to 3X leverage, which equals to 300 USD assets, to increase his farming reward, and only pays a little borrowing interest.

• Bridge

Since multi-chain ecosystems keep ongoing, most people may hold multi-chain assets. As a result, there is a demand for people transferring their assets from one blockchain to another. Therefore, cross-chain bridges are very important to connect different blockchains. In particular, to bridge EVM-compatible chains to non EVM chains like Solana is less common. Allbridge and Wormhole are well-known bridges for Solana users.

• DeFi tools

To manage your Solana assets can be much easier by using helpful DeFi tools. Sonar Watch and Step Finance are ideal tools to monitor your spot assets, LPs, farms, lending or borrowing, and even NFT collectibles.

• Derivatives

In addition to the Solana projects mentioned above, there are some alternative decentralized derivatives that are very special. For example, MatrixETF is a decentralized platform offering ETF fund which contains a basket of high-quality crypto tokens. Buying SEI (Solanium Ecosystem Index) ETF also means investing a bundle of Solana-based tokens that represent Solana ecosystems.

Another interesting project is Sypool protocol. As its name indicated, Sypool is a synthetic asset management protocol which provides different investment strategies.

• NFT marketplacee

NFT has drawn huge attention over the past one year, and is still developing. Although the trading volume of NFT on Ethereum Network still dominates the market, the expensive gas fees always make users unsatisfied. By contrary, NFT transactions on Solana network are much happier due to its low transaction cost and good user experience.

Magic Eden is a high popularity marketplace of Solana chain. Many NFT collectibles are listed and traded here. Besides, some DeFi and GameFi projects may also provide their own platform for NFT minting, listing and trading.

• Web 3

Unlike traditional social media App such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram etc., CyberConnect recently built its Solana version of social graph protocol to connect people by means of your Solana wallet.

You are welcomed to follow me here.

Some examples of Solana ecosystem

A well-developed DeFi ecosystem is supposed to offer various services including DEX, lending, yield farming, trading, NFTs, and even GameFi or metaverse concept projects to fit today’s user demand. Undoubtedly, we see many successful Solana projects are quite creative, innovative with great values that are worth to dive into.