Five Promising Projects in the Solana Ecosystem Worth Following

Recently, the cryptocurrency market has experienced some fluctuations, but this has also provided opportunities for investors to position themselves in undervalued potential projects. As the two major focal ecosystems of this bull market, the rapid development and capital attraction effects of Solana and TON are noteworthy. Among them, the Solana ecosystem is relatively more mature and has significant advantages in innovation capability and large-scale adoption.

As the Ethereum ETF is about to launch, Solana has also begun to attract the attention of traditional capital. Its high throughput, low fees, strong security, and active community make Solana an ideal choice for exchange-traded funds, providing investors with a versatile and innovative open-source ecosystem.

The Potential of the Solana Ecosystem

The launch of Solana Blinks and Solana Actions has significantly lowered the barrier for developers to utilize the Solana blockchain, which will promote the application of Solana in fields such as DeFi, NFT markets, gaming, DAO governance, and RWA, and facilitate a seamless transition for more Web2 users to Web3 technology. For Solana ecosystem projects, this is an important opportunity to attract more users.

This article will introduce five projects in the Solana ecosystem worth following this year for investors' reference.

1. Drift Protocol

Drift Protocol integrates RWA and DeFi, providing users with a diverse range of DeFi products and experiences. It has recently partnered with ONDO Finance to support various stablecoins such as USDY as collateral for traders, making it the protocol with the broadest support for mainstream RWA assets on the Solana chain.

Drift Protocol has a rich product line, including derivatives trading, Swap, leveraged spot trading, and lending. With the advantages of low gas fees and fast confirmations on Solana, Drift Protocol offers users very low fees and a trading experience close to centralized exchanges.

Drift also offers pre-market trading and a fast listing channel, allowing for quick responses to hot assets in the ecosystem and providing investors with more trading strategies. This year, Drift's TVL grew from $117 million to a peak of $385 million, an increase of 3.3 times. The total trading volume reached $32 billion, with a recent 24-hour trading volume of about $220 million and active users reaching 190,000.

2. Jupiter

Jupiter is the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, helping users choose the best trading path by aggregating liquidity from multiple decentralized exchanges, minimizing swap transaction slippage and fees. Its daily trading volume once surpassed a well-known DEX, becoming the number one across the entire chain.

In addition to the advantages of fast and low-cost transactions, Jupiter also offers services such as automated investment scheduling, cross-chain bridges, perpetual contract trading, and Launchpad. Earlier this year, Jupiter airdropped JUP tokens to over 100,000 community users, becoming the largest airdrop event on Solana. Recently, it also airdropped cryptocurrency worth $60 million to users participating in DAO voting.

3. Kamino

Kamino is a DeFi project that integrates lending and liquidity provision. It controls the availability of lending funds through centralized liquidity market makers (CLMM) and offers an automatic deleveraging mechanism and "protected collateral" feature to safeguard assets against borrower default risk.

Currently, Kamino is conducting its second airdrop event. Providing stablecoins for the protocol is a relatively robust strategy. Among them, PYUSD has an annual yield of up to 18.39% on Kamino, and users can earn 3x points rewards. As of early July, Kamino's on-chain TVL reached $1.06 billion, an increase of 6.5 times since the beginning of the year.

4. Jito

Jito is a liquid staking protocol launched in 2022. Users can stake SOL to earn JitoSOL, and the staking rewards are directly accumulated into JitoSOL. Jito also provides users with the maximum extractable value (MEV) feature, and the MEV rewards will also be distributed into JitoSOL, thereby increasing overall returns.

Currently, Jito's TVL has reached $1.59 billion, increasing by 2.5 times since the beginning of the year. The protocol fees in the last 24 hours are $730,000, with a total fee of $150 million, and the number of users exceeds 100,000.

5. TipLinks

TipLinks is a lightweight wallet product that has similar functionality to the Blinks feature recently launched by Solana. Users can create a TipLink and send the link to others through any platform (SMS, social media, email, etc.).

Using TipLinks, complex crypto transactions can be completed with just a Google account. You can easily send crypto assets by clicking on a link, and even send to non-crypto users. The emergence of TipLinks and Blinks technology has broken the barriers between Web2 and Web3, providing a seamless payment experience for new crypto users and laying the foundation for the large-scale adoption of Web3.

Summary

From on-chain data, Drift Protocol leads in user numbers, with a wide range of products including lending, spot trading, leveraged trading, and contract trading in the DeFi space. Drift demonstrates clear advantages in integrating with the Solana ecosystem, promising to bring more flexibility to user assets and further enhance its competitiveness.

The locked positions of Jito and Kamino both exceed 1 billion USD, indicating a high level of capital interest. Jito's MEV functionality provides users with additional income, while Kamino's innovations in lending have also attracted users.

Jupiter has performed outstandingly in terms of TVL growth rate, which is related to its high-quality liquidity aggregation and airdrop expectations.

TipLinks provides the possibility for further adoption of cryptocurrencies and has explosive potential. Its performance in terms of security, usability, and composability needs to be observed in the future.

Compared to the previous bull market, this round has seen a surge of rapidly growing popular projects in the Solana ecosystem, covering multiple tracks such as DEX, Liquid Staking, Lending, NFT, and RWA. Solana continues to innovate technically, and its ecosystem projects demonstrate strong capital and user attraction, as well as potential for innovation. The TVL of ecosystem projects has generally achieved growth of over 2 times, and the number of users has reached hundreds of thousands, fully showcasing the innovative potential and future growth prospects of Solana DeFi.