Solana is one of the ecosystems that still has strong development even during the Crypto winter, although this development has not attracted a huge number of users like the period 2021 – 2022. So at the present time, the system What challenges is Solana ecology facing and what opportunities come with it? Everyone, please join us in learning and evaluating Solana in the article below.
To better understand the Solana ecosystem and evaluate, people can refer to some of the articles below:
- What is Solana (SOL)? Solana Cryptocurrency Overview
- Potential Next Generation Projects on Solana Ecosystem
- THE HAK SHOW #2 | Solana And Her Quest To Regain Glory
Opportunities With Solana Ecosystem
The development team is still active
Visa is a leading company and corporation in the world in payments and is also committed to leading in cryptocurrency innovation and Blockchain technology, has officially announced the testing of USDC Stablecoin payment capabilities. to Solana’s Blockchain. In fact, through live tests with issuers and acquirers, Visa has transferred millions of USDC between its partners across the Solana and Ethereum networks.
This is quite positive news for the Solana team and community, it also proves that despite many infrastructure problems and still in the process of upgrading, Solana is still one of the leading Blockchains. has the best performance on the market today.
Next, on September 6, Solana Foudation officially announced to the Hyperdrive Hackathon community that it is a Global Hackathon taking place from September 6 – October 15 with a prize pool of up to $1M. Hackathon winning projects can receive additional investment from Solana Foundation and many reputable VCs such as Jump Crypto or Paradigm.
In Hyperdrive Hackathon, Solana Foundation targets a number of areas such as:
- Physical Infrastructure Networks: With the goal of designing Incentives programs to build Physical Infrastructure to compete with traditional competitors.
- Artificial Intelligence: Combining AI and Crypto to promote cryptocurrency products.
- Finance & Payment: Towards decentralized main ship projects.
- Mobile Summer Apps: Building products on phones.
- Crypto Infrastructure: Build tools & infrastructure to power the above Protocols and DApps.
- Gaming & Entertainment: Search for projects in Gaming, NFT and more.
- DAOs & Network State: Build tools and communities with clear goals and objectives.
In this Global Hackathon, the focus is on “Infastructure“, which means that Solana Foundation is aiming to not only find, build and apply solutions themselves, but also that projects in the ecosystem must also consider this as their mission and obligation. Statistics show that a number of projects on the Solana ecosystem also make important contributions to improving infrastructure, and often that improvement helps the project differentiate itself from its competitors. industry, a typical example is Jito Labs with JitoSOL.
Besides, Hackathon Global is still looking for potential projects in old fields such as DeFi, NFT, Gaming or DAOs, but there is a new field that is AI. Solana sees that the trend of integrating AI into Crypto projects could become a trend in the future so they are sowing the seeds.
Compared to previous Hackathon events, this time there have been quite obvious changes:
- Total prize pool reduced from $4 – $5M to just $1M.
- There is an additional investment element from the Seed round with real potential projects.
To understand this change, perhaps we can pull back the curtain on the history of Global Hackathon events on Solana from the past to the present.
Looking back at history, we see that the total number of projects participating in Hackathon is more than 3,000, but reality shows that there are only about 100 projects with TVL listed on DefiLlama in the context of those 100 projects to date. Only a few projects survived and continued to maintain through the winter, along with a number of projects in infrastructure, NFT, Gaming,… without TVL, there would only be about more than 500 projects. is going into operation on the Solana ecosystem. Obviously, this is an ineffective number, although through the chart we see that the Global Hackathon on Solana is becoming more and more attractive. Perhaps the projects being built are quite short-term. The short-term here is aimed at Grants and Rewards, not building a real product.
Therefore, this time there has been a change in rewards to find real potential projects and combined with investment, pressure from VCs will make developers responsible for their children. his brainchild. Another reason could be that Solana is facing financial pressure because before that, although Global Hackathons still spent up to $5M and winning projects were still funded normally.
Notably, Solana still maintains its form with 2 Global Hackathons taking place every year. Evaluating Solana fairly, this is the platform that has organized the most Global Hackathon events ever.
Projects still accompany and develop
An extremely interesting thing about the Solana ecosystem is that besides the projects that have stopped operating and there are projects that have left the ecosystem, there are still projects that continue to stay and develop together with Solana. like Marinade Finance, Orca, Solend, UXD Protocol, Drift Protocol,… mostly full of projects in different DeFi pieces, making the DeFi picture on Solana not too unique but not poor either. .
There are still new projects born with positive contributions to the ecosystem such as:
- Marginfi Lending & Borrowing project with point-based Liquidity Mining mechanism has attracted a large number of users to participate.
- Jito Labs has built a MEV solution that both makes the Solana network more efficient and helps the project generate more revenue.
- Sanctum aims to solve the problems caused by the growing LSD on Solana with a main focus on liquidity.
Developers are still active
According to the Crypto Commits index provided by Cryptomiso based on commit history on Github, Solana is always one of the platforms with the best performing developers besides Mina Protocol, PancakeSwap, Internet Computer,. ..
Over the past 12 months, the number of active developers on the Solna network has been maintained regularly with more than 100 Contributors compared to Sushiswap with only about 21 Contributors or Mina Protocol with only about 87 Contributors. However, these indicators are only considered for reference purposes and need to be considered along with many other factors such as what are the developers doing on them? With Solana, we improve, upgrade and change the network, even eliminating unnecessary elements.
Challenges with the Solana Ecosystem
Negative on-chain indicators
Number of Active wallet addresses on Solana according to Solscan
The number of Active wallet addresses on the Solana network has decreased dramatically from mid-2022 until now. The current number is relatively alarming. Since its inception, the number of Active addresses on the network has always remained at around 300K, but now this number has gradually decreased to nearly 200K. This comes from the fact that the NFT market on Solana is also gradually cooling down.
Number of Transactions on the Solana network according to Solscan
The number of Transactions on the Solana network also shows signs of decreasing over time but has stopped at about $17M transactions per day. This is also a good sign that those who stay in the ecosystem still maintain a certain level of activity and even higher to compensate for the loss of users.
In a context where the market has a strong recovery due to the main driving forces coming from Layer 2 and Airdrop, similar to the general context of the entire DeFi industry, DeFi on Solana has not recovered. The TVL of the entire ecosystem remains around $300M. In essence, there is no new cash flow pouring into the Solana ecosystem, there is only cash flow in the system itself moving back and forth between Protocols.
Negative news for the Solana ecosystem
In the context of DeFi on Solana still not showing positive signs, Lido Finance – the popular LSD protocol on Ethereum, with the 2nd highest TVL in the entire Solana ecosystem, is likely to have to stop providing services to the platform because because of financial problems.
Currently, the Lido development team on Solana has requested $1.5M worth of aid from Lido DAO for several main purposes:
- Continue to have enough funding to maintain operations.
- Upgrade products and generate more revenue.
- Improved user friendliness.
In fact, if Lido refuses to support Solana like they do with Polkadot, it won’t be a problem because on the Solana ecosystem there is still Marinade Finance, JitoSOL, Socean,… but the loss here will be prestige. credibility in the eyes of users. Let’s wait and see what the results of this deal will be? In the past, there were many projects that spoke up to leave the Solana ecosystem and there were also projects that left in silence.
Current & Future Solana Assessment
Current Solana review
It can be said that Solana has been trying to overcome the most difficult times since the time FTX collapsed, Sam went to jail and Alameda Research was shaken. Besides many other Layer 1 platforms, Solana is still active in many different fields:
- Organize events to attract developers.
- Solve network problems through updates, upgrades and changes.
Future Solana review
I confidently assert that not many ecosystems or development teams of other Layer 1 platforms can do what Solana is doing at the present time. However, to confirm whether Solana can return in the next cycle, I am not sure, but at first it is about 70 – 80% that they can do it. I take this 70 – 80% from the following evidence:
- Solana’s network has somewhere improved, currently Solana’s TPS level is about 4,000 TPS. A much higher number than even Ethereum – Layer 2 or some newly launched Layer 1s like Sui or Aptos.
- Solana has created a trend on its own with Move to Earn and “accidentally” became one of the best platforms for NFTs. No other platform can do this!
- New projects are still born on Solana with some names like Canctum, Marginfi, Jito Labs,… projects that stay are still upgraded and developed like UXD Protocol, Drift Protocol,…
- Solana is still looking for potential projects in areas that can become trends in the future such as Gaming, Payment, AI,… however it seems they are missing out on projects in the SocialFi segment.
With Solana, I continue to monitor, observe and look for potential projects. If anyone tells you: “Don’t believe in projects in the old cycle”, I will share with you: “True but not enough. True in that many old projects cannot survive the cycle.” next period like NEO, Monero,… but we still have a few names rising from the grave like Cardano. But the rate is too small so choose carefully.”
Summary
Above are the challenges, opportunities and evaluation of Solana in recent times. The opportunity for Solana is still there but the challenge is still too great. Preliminary assessment of Solana shows that this is still a platform and an ecosystem worth monitoring in the present and the future.
