A Quick Guide to Solana’s Recent Technology and Popular Projects

Exploring Solana's Cutting-Edge Technology and Top-Rated Projects A User-Friendly Guide

Author: Daniel Li

As the representative of the old-fashioned public chain, Solana is slowly recovering from the FTX crash. With this wave of Bitcoin market, Solana’s token SOL has also started to rise strongly, with a surge of up to 69.96% in the past 30 days, surpassing more than 90% of other tokens. According to CoinCodex’s forecast, the optimistic estimate for SOL is that its price is expected to reach triple digits by the end of 2024.

The strong rise of Solana is partly due to its previous trauma, with the token price plummeting from over $200 to $10, severely undervaluing its market capitalization. As the impact of the FTX events slowly fades away, Solana has been steadily building its high-performance blockchain infrastructure, which has reignited investor interest. Additionally, recent airdrops of Solana’s ecosystem projects have caused unprecedented market attention, and investors generally have a positive outlook on Solana. Solana may have the opportunity to return to its former glory in this wave of market sentiment.

The desperate counterattack of the sleeping giant Solana

2022 was a heavy blow to the entire cryptocurrency industry. Numerous crypto institutions frequently collapsed, and Solana, as an established public chain, was not spared either. Throughout 2022, Solana faced various challenges such as network interruptions and the closure of FTX. Solana’s market capitalization plummeted by about 93%, while the Total Value Locked (TVL) of the network declined by 96%. The price of SOL also experienced a cliff-like drop. Coupled with the overall downturn of the cryptocurrency market, SOL’s price bottomed out at $8 before barely stabilizing and rebounding. By the end of 2022, people seemed to have lost hope in Solana’s future prospects and speculated that Solana would soon spiral into death.

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However, after entering 2023, Solana did not spiral into death as expected by the general public. Instead, with the initial rebound of Bitcoin at the beginning of the year, SOL stabilized and gradually rose from its lowest point of $7.85. In the first quarter, SOL remained above $20. Although Bitcoin subsequently experienced a significant correction, the price of SOL remained stable at around $20. It was not until October when the market entered a massive uptrend that SOL started to steadily rise, with its price surpassing $60 and reaching a peak of $68.25. Compared to the lowest point of $7.85 at the beginning of the year, the price of SOL has almost multiplied by 8, and the current price of the SOL token is $61.

The strong recovery of Solana’s token has also caused skeptical investors to frenzy and accumulate SOL. In this surge, the Korean community, which is enthusiastic about trading, has played an important role. According to reports, the Korean won ranks second after the US dollar, accounting for 12.3% in the SOL fiat trading pairs in the past few months. Moreover, on the Korean exchanges Bithumb and Upbit, SOL is quoted at $64.34 and $63.61, respectively, both higher than the global average price of $61.80 per unit, which shows the Korean people’s crazy enthusiasm for buying SOL. SOL once dominated the number one spot in trading volume on the largest Korean cryptocurrency exchange, Upbit, accounting for 7.65% of the total trading volume on the exchange.

The change in attitude towards Solana in the market is not only due to the astonishing increase in its token value over the past year, but also because of the series of measures taken by the project team to revive Solana. These measures have restored market confidence in Solana and attracted the attention of investors who had lost hope in the project.

Why Solana is rising again

The strong recovery of Solana is closely related to its strong leadership. Solana’s co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, has nearly twenty years of experience in building high-performance operating systems, and his technical expertise has laid a solid foundation for Solana’s success. Yakovenko was acclaimed for developing “Proof of History (PoH)”. Another co-founder, Solana Raj Gokal, is also a well-known figure in the tech industry. They both have confidence in Solana and believe it has the potential to become the “Apple” of the crypto world.

It is because Solana’s founders are confident in its future that Solana has been able to maintain its focus on continuous improvement and innovation in the technological field, even when the market lost faith in it. This is what has led to Solana’s strong recovery.

In 2023, Solana introduced a series of new technologies to enhance its blockchain performance and drive application development.

State Compression Technology: Solana introduced state compression technology to improve blockchain performance, reduce transaction costs, and enhance the tradability of NFTs. This technology processes the transaction data in Solana’s ledger through hashing and verifies the Merkle Tree accounts for application in smart contracts. This means that compressed NFTs can be created on-chain in a similar way, but at only a fraction of the previous cost. State compression technology provides Solana with higher throughput and lower transaction costs, which has attracted more users and developers.

Compressed NFT Technology: Solana launched compressed NFTs, a technology that changes the perception of NFTs in the crypto market and brings new use cases that seemed impossible before. With compressed NFTs, NFT creators can mint 100 million NFTs for a price of just 50 SOL. This is significant for market participants. In fact, compressed NFTs enable game studios to mint every item or character in a game as an NFT, and social media platforms can easily distribute NFTs to each user. In the future, we may witness the circulation of billions of physical assets on the blockchain. The introduction of compressed NFT technology has driven the development of the NFT market and expanded the application scope of the Solana ecosystem.

Neon EVM: Solana introduced Neon EVM, a solution that is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), enabling developers to run Ethereum-based smart contracts in the Solana ecosystem. The introduction of Neon EVM provides Ethereum developers with more options and flexibility, allowing them to run their smart contracts on Solana without the need for code modifications. This promotes developer migration and growth of the Solana ecosystem.

Solang: Solana has also launched Solang, a tool for writing smart contracts on the Solana blockchain. Solang supports programming languages like Rust and C, providing developers with more choices. Developers can use Solang to write efficient and secure smart contracts and deploy them on the Solana blockchain. The launch of Solang further improves the developer-friendliness and usability of Solana, attracting more developers to join the Solana ecosystem.

In addition to continuous innovation in the technical field, Solana has also invested more energy and funds than ever before to promote the innovation and development of ecosystem projects. In 2023, the Solana Foundation launched a series of growth initiatives, such as Convertible Grants and AI Grants, to support and invest in projects within the Solana ecosystem. Through these initiatives, the Solana Foundation encourages and incentivizes the development of innovative projects and provides them with funding and resource support.

Furthermore, the Solana community is also playing an active role, with community members promoting, participating, and contributing code to drive the development of Solana. The increased community attention has attracted more developers and users to Solana and facilitated ecosystem growth.

In addition, Solana has started to focus on strengthening partnerships with major participants in the crypto ecosystem, establishing strategic alliances to provide diversified use cases and promote further innovation in the crypto space. In 2023, Solana added strategic alliances including Chainlink (LINK), Serum (SRM), ChainSafe, Sabre Lab, Bonfida, Raydium (RAY), and more. These strategic alliances bring more collaboration opportunities to Solana, expand its influence in the crypto industry, and provide more support and synergy for ecosystem development.

Airdrops Approaching, Solana Ecosystem May Experience a Boom

Solana’s strong recovery has sparked investors’ desire for its token SOL, but this strong demand has not led to a surge in liquidity in the Solana ecosystem. Compared to the staggering rise of SOL, the Total Value Locked (TVL) of Solana has not increased significantly. Solana’s TVL, measured in USD, has risen by 200%, which may seem impressive, but it is still lower than the pre-collapse low point of $10 billion for FTX and it has actually decreased by 45% in terms of TVL measured in SOL, highlighting the limited liquidity of the project’s ecosystem.

Liquidity is crucial for ecosystem development, and after realizing the problem of inadequate liquidity, the Solana ecosystem has taken a series of measures. In the past month alone, several important projects have announced airdrop plans, as airdrops are undoubtedly the most direct way to attract traffic. Here is a brief introduction to these projects:

Jupiter

Jupiter is the first DEX aggregator on the Solana chain, aiming to provide users with the best exchange rates by integrating all major liquidity markets on the Solana blockchain, and offering the best DeFi exchange experience for users and developers. The project went live on the Jupiter mainnet on October 13, 2021, and has been continuously optimized and improved based on user feedback and experience, adding more DEX paths on the Solana chain. Currently, the Jupiter website supports popular Solana DEXs such as Orca, Raydium, Serum, Mercurial, Saber, Dexla, and more.

On November 22, 2023, Jupiter Exchange launched the JUP token community airdrop program. The program will airdrop a total of 1 billion JUP tokens to 955,000 eligible Solana wallets. The airdrop will be conducted through Solana wallet addresses, and each eligible Solana wallet will receive 1,050 JUP tokens. Jupiter Exchange plans to conduct 4 rounds of airdrops, with the token quantity and ratio adjusted based on community feedback and market conditions. In addition, Jupiter Exchange announced that it will gift exclusive NFTs to early members of the project and prioritize token distribution to Jupiter’s users and early supporters in the community.

With the launch of the airdrop program and the release of NFTs, Jupiter Exchange is preparing to further build its community and create a thriving ecosystem around the project. The project emphasizes community participation and user experience, with the aim of driving widespread adoption and becoming a leader in the Solana-based DEX space. Through continuous development and innovation, Jupiter Exchange will make significant contributions to the development and promotion of the Solana ecosystem.

Jito

Jito is an important project in the Solana ecosystem, aiming to address the MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) problem on the Solana chain and mitigate failures caused by congestion on the Solana chain. It provides a staking product, but unlike other liquidity staking protocols, Jito not only offers staking rewards but also additional rewards for MEV. Jito’s team also focuses on the MEV track and has launched the third-party validator client Jito-Solana on Solana, which can effectively capture MEV earnings in the Solana network and reduce the risk of invalid transaction dust attacks and failures of the entire Solana public chain.

On November 28th, Jito announced the launch of its token airdrop program on January 1, 2024. According to the plan, Jito will issue a governance token called JTO and allocate 10% of the total supply for community retroactive airdrops. This airdrop will play a key role in the community governance of Jito. Users holding JTO tokens can participate in setting the fees for the JitoSOL equity pool, control the update delegation strategy for StakeNet parameters, manage the DAO treasury of JTO tokens and the revenue of JitoSOL, and contribute to the enhancement of Jito Network.

The total supply of JTO tokens is 1 billion, of which 10% will be allocated for community retroactive airdrops. The airdrop targets include users holding JitoSOL, Solana validators running Jito-Solana MEV clients, and users actively using MEV programs on the Jito Network. The specific allocation details are as follows: community growth accounts for 34.3%; ecosystem development accounts for 25%; investors account for 16.2%; core contributors account for 24.5%.

This airdrop plan is of great significance to Jito. Firstly, it strengthens Jito’s community governance, allowing token holders to participate in important decision-making and drive the project’s development and growth. Secondly, the airdrop program attracts more users and validators to Jito, increasing the community participation and security of the project. In addition, Jito’s airdrop has a positive impact on the Solana ecosystem. It plays an important role in promoting liquidity and transaction activity on the Solana chain, providing users with better staking rewards and additional MEV incentives. This will further drive the development of the Solana ecosystem, attract more projects and users to join, and enhance the overall prosperity of the ecosystem.

Pyth Network

Pyth Network is a decentralized oracle project built on the Solana blockchain. Its goal is to aggregate off-chain financial data onto the blockchain, providing high-quality and high-fidelity data for DeFi and traditional finance. The project has gained support from numerous institutional investors and has partnered with top-tier partners such as GTS, the largest market-maker on the NYSE, institutional trading platform LMAX, FTX, and Chicago Trading Company, among others.

To promote the development and decentralization of Pyth Network, the project announced an airdrop program on November 20, 2023. The airdrop will last for 90 days, with the open claiming period starting on November 20, 2023, at 22:00 and ending on February 18, 2024. This airdrop program is a wide-ranging cross-chain airdrop, covering over 90,000 wallet addresses on 27 chains. All community members who contribute to the Pyth Network ecosystem and individual users who utilize Pyth data are eligible to participate.

The airdrop program of Pyth Network will incentivize community participation in on-chain governance and drive the project towards decentralization, self-sustainability, and permissionless state. As an oracle network in the Solana ecosystem, the growth of Pyth Network will also enhance the sustainability and decentralization of the Solana ecosystem, attracting more participation and attention.

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