Top 6 Solana Projects in 2022

What is Solana and what makes it unique?

Solana is one of the most developer-friendly blockchains out there, with a thriving network of dApps and DeFi protocols. Launched publicly in 2020, Solana is ambitiously designed to be decentralized, secure, and scalable, something that many top blockchains, including Ethereum struggle with to date.

Solana boasts of an extremely high TPS. Theoretically, Solana can support over 50000 transactions per second and not break a sweat. In addition to this, it boasts of extremely low transaction fees at less than 1 cent per transaction. These properties make Solana an obvious choice for blockchain developers around the world who are looking to host cost-friendly, scalable, and efficient projects.

Part of this efficiency is derived from the fact that Solana uses a much-celebrated consensus mechanism called proof of history to validate the transactions on the blockchain. You can read more about What is Proof of History? to understand how it helps Solana in adding a new block to the blockchain every 400 milliseconds.

Here are the top 6 projects powered by Solana -

Orca

Orca.so is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market maker (AMM) which enables users to trade Solana-native and Solana-wrapped tokens without a centralized counterparty. With a focus on human-centered design, Orca stands out from other DeFi protocols that require users to have more technical knowledge, providing a smooth experience for new users in decentralized finance (DeFi).

Orca employs numerous features to enhance usability for users, such as the Fair Price Indicator. This alerts users who are about to make a trade that results in high slippage or will otherwise result in them paying a price that is substantially higher than the current market price on Coingecko. (Users can still make the trade if they choose to do so.)

To enable greater capital efficiency for all users, Orca facilitates concentrated liquidity pools (Whirlpools), This gives liquidity providers (LPs) the opportunity to compete for higher yields while providing better prices and less slippage to traders. The Whirlpools smart contract has been dual-audited and open-sourced, allowing other applications to use Orca as a liquidity layer.

Magic Eden

Unlike most other NFT platforms, Magic Eden is both, a primary and a secondary marketplace for NFTs. This allows creators to launch their art on the platform and NFT flippers to resell that art.

This allows magiceden.io to host a community of creators, flippers and collectors all in a single platform.

Magic Eden also has a very robust white-labeling solution, allowing other projects to build an NFT marketplace for their audience. About 97% of all NFTs traded on Solana are facilitated by Magic Eden.

Despite the space being fairly new, Magic Eden boasts of more than 10 million unique monthly visitors across its website and mobile apps. It also has a discord-based DAO called MagicDAO. There are no listing fees to list on Magic Eden and a decent 2% transaction fee on all transactions.

With the latest funding round in June 2022, Magic Eden aims to foray with speed into its gaming verticle. The gaming industry is poised to become one of the most prominent use-cases for NFTs - having the potential to build a strong community and having the scope to sell and purchase both fungible and non-fungible goods.

Gameta

Being one of the most promising gaming protocol on the Solana blockchain, Gameta.pro deserved a mention in this list. Gameta is one of the largest gaming protocols on Solana and boasts of about 40000 daily active users, showing immense promise. It is building a collection of addictive arcade games to bring in users from web2 to web3. In a span of 3 months, it has onboarded more than 90000 users on its platform.

Gameta soon plans to launch its own NFT collection, that would possibly supplement its gaming products.

Port Finance

Port Finance is a non-custodial lending and borrowing protocol built on top of Solana. It offers floating interest rates to its lenders and borrowers. Simply put, Port Finance allows lenders to deposit their coins and earn certain APY on the coins deposited, it allows borrowers to borrow against their deposits and offers a whole range of lending like interest swaps and fixed interest lending.

In its floating interest rates product, the utilization rate for any asset is an important factor in determining the APYs offered. Deposit APY depends on 2 factors - the borrow APY and utilization rate. For example, the borrow APY on a particular asset is 10%. With a 10% utilization rate (utilization rate is the percentage of the total value of that asset that is lent out), a 1% deposit APY would be offered by Port Finance.

OwlDAO

OwlDAO is a leading blockchain-based gaming project that is supported by Solana, Ethereum, and a lot many blockchains. Majority of its activity is on the Solana blockchain. It hosts a bunch on games on its platform, allowing users to gamble using the native OWL token and earn. It processes a volume of more than $100k per day and boasts of about 6000 monthly active users.

OwlDAO also has a staking platform where it offers upto 42% APY on its native token and upto 38.15% APY on BUSD

Since its launch in January 2021, the OwlDAO token has grown from about 0.4 cents to about 1.8 cents now.

Its most promising verticle of all is perhaps its casino platform. OwlDAO white labels its casino platform allowed other players in the gaming space to build their own gambling verticles. Although the space is too new at the moment, but given the addictiveness of gambling products across geographies, OwlDAO is placed very comfortably for the next market cycle.

UXD Protocol

UXD Protocol is an algorithmic stablecoin backed by a delta neutral using perpetual swaps. What this essentially means is that for every UXD minted by depositing Bitcoin or other crypto assets, the protocol uses it as collateral to short an equivalent amount of Bitcoin-USD perpetual swap contract. This ensures that the value of UXD stays very close to $1 always. UXD protocol claims to address the stablecoin trilemma, which assumes that a stablecoin can never possess more than 2 of these properties: decentralized, stable, and capital efficient. When the price of the stablecoin increases to more than $1, the system assumes that there will be a sell-off to bring the price back to the peg. For if it falls, the protocol has put in place an insurance fund to cover the delta.