For the previous article, see the previous article: "Solana Comprehensive Report: Not Just Apple in the Web3 Era (Part 1)" ; the second article: "Solana Comprehensive Report: Not Just Apple in the Web3 Era (Part 2)"
Below is a list of some projects in the Infrastructure & Development Tools space that are worth keeping an eye on and that are important for the future development of the Solana ecosystem.
Backpack
Coral, the company behind the Anchor development framework, created the Backpack wallet and the Mad Lads series, both iconic representations of scalable technology and a virtuous community in the Solana ecosystem. Both products are implemented in the form of xNFTs, which are standard plugins for "executable" Web3 application assets. The Backpack wallet was launched to allow users to experience a variety of dApps implemented in the form of xNFTs in an integrated environment. It currently provides a seamless user experience for about 90 xNFT-based applications across various fields such as games, NFTs, and DeFi.
Phantom and Solflare
Phantom and Solflare are the most widely used wallets in the Solana ecosystem. The Phantom wallet is known for its user-friendly interface and NFT management features in the mobile environment, while the Solflare wallet is known for its sleek interface and focus on security in the web environment.
At the recent Breakpoint event, Phantom announced updates to its "embedded wallet," including new features such as seed phrase-free login and universal Phantom accounts. Meanwhile, Solflare played a key role in implementing Seeker Mobile's Seed Vault functionality, which is expected to launch in the first half of 2025.
Squads
Squads is a custody solution for asset management that provides a variety of smart account standards including asset management, permission settings and multi-signatures to achieve safer asset management and operations.
The Squads Labs team has launched the first smart wallet in the Solana ecosystem, Fuse Wallet, which is now available for iOS. Fuse Wallet provides multiple features such as two-factor authentication (2FA), spending limits, social recovery, time locks, key rotation, gas abstraction, and native staking. Recently, they also launched Fuse Pay, a virtual Visa card that makes it easy for users to make payments.
In addition, the Squads team announced the Squads Policy Network (SPN) to enable enterprises to manage centralized hosting in a zero-trust, decentralized manner. SPN is integrated with Jito's (Re)staking and will provide custom and universal policies for all users.
Python Network
Pyth Network is an oracle network that provides real-time financial market data required by DeFi services on the blockchain. It currently collects data from more than 90 first-party data providers and provides real-time price data for crypto assets, stocks, ETFs, and commodities to developers on more than 40 blockchains.
In the future, Pyth Network plans to launch an Oracle Integrity Staking (OIS) delegation mechanism that will reward Pyth stakers while enabling the network to obtain high-quality data from publishers to support DeFi projects.
Switchboard
Switchboard is a decentralized, customizable oracle network that enables developers to build customized oracles to securely connect off-chain data to the chain. It also helps developers reduce costs by providing data only when needed, and uses trusted execution environments (TEEs) to ensure the security and integrity of data.
Code
Code SDK is an open payment protocol and application that allows developers to easily receive micropayments from users around the world. Anyone can charge users small fees in a web environment through the "Pay with Code" button, where users pay a 5 cent fee and developers pay a fixed 1 cent fee to cover blockchain transaction costs.
The Code team has been using the technology to build a variety of consumer products, such as a micropayment product (physical/digital) called Tip Card, and Pennypost, a content platform that allows users to support individual articles written by creators.
Dialect
Dialect is committed to developing a development stack for decentralized messaging protocols based on the Solana network. Recently, Dialect has partnered with the Solana Foundation to launch a service called Blinks (Blockchain Links). The Dialect team is currently responsible for key updates to the Blink client SDK and provides support to many Blink developers.
Sphere
Sphere Labs is a settlement project that emerged from the Solana Summer Camp hackathon in December. Sphere offers a variety of features, including crypto deposits and withdrawals, on-chain subscriptions, invoicing, payment links, AML/fraud measures, and reporting. Recently, Sphere launched SphereNet, a high-performance virtual machine project focused on bridging the gap between regulatory-compliant institutions and blockchains.
TipLink
TipLink is a lightweight non-custodial wallet that allows users to easily transfer digital assets through a link or QR code. In other words, users only need to connect their Gmail account or Solana wallet to the received link or QR code, and can immediately create a wallet and use the assets received through this linked wallet.
Anza
The Anza team is a software development company focused on building the Solana ecosystem. The team consists of many core engineers from Solana Labs, and through various client diversification initiatives, such as independent client development (such as Agave) and support (such as Firedancer, etc.) and contributions to other major protocols in the Solana ecosystem (such as token expansion functions, Solana platform tools and SDKs, etc.), the SVM ecosystem is more widely adopted.
Helius
Helius is a platform that enables stable blockchain application development by providing APIs, RPC nodes, webhooks, and various developer tools to Solana ecosystem developers.
Light Protocol
Light Protocol is a team building the ZK Layer in the Solana ecosystem. They co-developed ZK compression technology with the Helius team.
Metaplex
Metaplex is a typical library that provides various tools to facilitate the creation, sale and management process of digital assets in the Solana and SVM ecosystems, including ownership expression, permission management, compressed NFT creation, deployment management, etc.
The protocol fees are collected in different proportions depending on how much users use each Metaplex tool. Half of these fees go into the Metaplex DAO treasury in the form of $MPLX (Metaplex’s utility and governance token), and the other half is used by the non-profit Metaplex Foundation for the continued development, security, governance, and management of the Metaplex DAO.
In addition, the Metaplex team recently launched an indexing and data availability network called Aura Network. This network allows users to easily store and retrieve data, flexibly manage states in the Solana and SVM ecosystems, and perform multi-process consistent indexing through an enhanced Digital Asset Standard (DAS) API.
Solana Labs
Founded in 2018, the Solana Labs team is responsible for the continued development and support of Solana’s overall core technology stack, from infrastructure design to client and token standards (such as token scaling capabilities), with the goal of ensuring the Solana network runs in an optimized and efficient manner.
Syndica
Syndica is an infrastructure provider for the Solana ecosystem, providing scalable RPC node services and various developer tools. Notably, Syndica is developing the ChainStream API, which enables real-time streaming of Solana blockchain data, and Sig, a validator client built using the low-level programming language Zig.
Wormhole
Wormhole is a multi-chain bridging protocol created by Solana in collaboration with Certus One, which enables the transfer of information and assets between multiple blockchains (including Solana). In particular, Wormhole's cross-chain assets have the highest liquidity on Solana. The main goal of Wormhole is to overcome the liquidity fragmentation problem in the blockchain ecosystem and build an integrated environment where assets and information can move freely between different networks.
To achieve this goal, Wormhole has adopted the Native Token Transfer (NTT) framework, which adopts the destruction and minting mechanism, Circle’s CCTP, etc., and plans to enhance multi-chain governance capabilities through the recently launched $W token to strengthen decentralized operations.
Eclipse
Eclipse is an Ethereum layer 2 network based on SVM, using Ethereum as the settlement layer. It also uses Celestia as a data availability solution and uses RISC Zero's zero-knowledge proof for verification. In this way, Eclipse focuses on ensuring high performance (processing as many transactions as possible) while maximizing the feasibility of verification.
Neon EVM
Neon EVM is a project that allows the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to run on the Solana blockchain. The goal of the project is to enable Ethereum-based applications and smart contracts to take advantage of Solana's advantages, such as fast transaction speeds, low fees, and parallel processing capabilities. With Neon EVM, Ethereum developers can easily migrate their existing Ethereum applications to the Solana network. Neon EVM can access data stored in Solana accounts, and all (class) Ethereum accounts in Neon EVM are stored in the corresponding Solana account.
Rome
The core idea behind the Rome protocol is to improve the efficiency of Rollup transaction processing by using Solana as their shared sorting layer. In other words, Solana sorts and executes transactions from various Rollups on Ethereum (or Celestia), while Rome updates the status of each Rollup based on these processed transactions and ensures that these status changes are submitted to Ethereum (or Celestia).
SOON
SOON (Solana Optimistic Network) is committed to providing the most efficient transaction settlement solution on any Layer 1 through a high-performance Rollup stack based on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Its main products include SOON stack (a modular framework combining SVM and OP Stack) and SOON Mainnet (a general SVM Layer 2 to be deployed on Ethereum).
Termina
In the Solana ecosystem, we are seeing new projects building with SVM application chains, rollups, and sidechains. These approaches take advantage of Solana’s execution environment while maintaining flexibility in setting up block creation, block space, transaction ordering, and state management systems.
Developed by Nitro Labs, Termina provides a SVM cloud platform service that enables these projects to optimize and configure the technology stack for their needs.
5.2 Finance
Solana is known for pioneering retail-focused areas such as DePIN, mobile devices, and payments, but it is also making significant progress in the financial sector. As mentioned earlier, PayPal successfully introduced PayPal USD (PYUSD) to Solana in late May, joining the ranks of financial institutions such as Visa, WorldPay, and Stripe. Recently, Libre Capital launched an institutional fund for Solana using token expansion capabilities.
Solana's individual DeFi areas are also showing strong growth. Solana's DEX platform has maintained high trading volumes throughout the year, sometimes even exceeding Ethereum. Notably, Jito has become the leading LST protocol, significantly increasing the amount of staked SOL, with approximately 13 million SOL currently staked on Jito. In addition, with various LST and re-staking programs such as Sanctum and the upcoming Solayer and Fragmetric gaining attention, coupled with Coinbase's native cbBTC entering the Solana network, the synergy within Solana's DeFi ecosystem is expected to be even stronger.
The most notable success story in the financial sector this year is undoubtedly Pump.Fun, a memecoin issuance platform on Solana. Pump.Fun is a platform that allows users to easily create memecoins, effectively capturing the huge speculative demand for memecoins from a wide range of retail investors. Since its launch in January 2024, Pump.Fun has grown rapidly and has become one of the top 10 protocols in all blockchain ecosystems in terms of fees and revenue. In just seven months, the total fees/revenue generated by the platform surged from 8 SOL on February 2, 2024 to 700,675 SOL on September 7, 2024.
Of course, it’s often argued that Solana’s DeFi ecosystem is limited to memecoin trading, but in reality, this can be seen as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Not only does it show how Solana’s fanatic culture is taking root, but it also proves that the network is capable of handling a large number of transactions thanks to its high throughput and low latency.
In addition to the above projects, the following are some highlight projects in the "finance" field that are worth paying attention to in the future.
Compute Labs & DBunker
Compute Labs and DBunker are leading an emerging field that combines real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) called DePINFi. Their goal is to lower the barrier to entry for AI computing and DePIN by reducing high initial capital costs, reducing the need for expertise, and simplifying the management complexity of physical infrastructure.
Compute Labs achieves this goal by transforming GPUs into GNFTs (GPU Non-Fungible Tokens) through its Compute Tokenization Protocol (CTP). The protocol effectively financializes computing hardware, which can then be deployed in various DeFi activities, thereby unlocking new value and creating a market for GPUs as an asset class.
DBunker simplifies the DePIN process by tokenizing physical mining hardware through its platform. The platform creates digital assets that represent shares of physical mining equipment, allowing users to participate in DePIN without having to deal with the complexity of managing physical infrastructure.
Etherfuse
Etherfuse is an RWA platform that uses blockchain technology to tokenize real-world assets, particularly sovereign debt in emerging markets. Its goal is to expand access to financial markets and increase liquidity, with a focus on debt in these regions. Recently, Etherfuse received $3 million in funding and plans to tokenize more assets, including those from the Mexican Stock Exchange. In addition, it also plans to expand its business to markets in Spain, Switzerland, and Dubai.
Parcl
Parcl is a decentralized real estate exchange built on Solana that allows users to trade and speculate on global real estate market prices. This is achieved through Parcl's City Index, which tracks the average price per square foot or square meter in various cities, giving users exposure to the real estate market of an entire city rather than a single property.
ISC
ISC (International Stable Currency) is a stablecoin project built on Solana, which aims to provide users with a stable, internationally recognized currency that can be used both online and offline. Unlike traditional stablecoins that are pegged to fiat currencies such as the US dollar, ISC is pegged to physical assets such as commodities, bonds, and stocks, and has anti-inflation characteristics.
Perena
Perena focuses on enhancing the usability, liquidity, and rewards of stablecoins in DeFi, with a mission to facilitate frictionless exchange of USD-pegged assets and maximize the yield on idle stablecoin liquidity. Perena's stablecoin exchange product, Numéraire, is a decentralized stablecoin exchange that incentivizes deep liquidity, benefiting both liquidity providers and the entire market.
Sky Ecosystem
Sky (formerly MakerDAO) is a DeFi protocol that plans to expand into the Solana DeFi ecosystem by integrating its USDS (stablecoin) and SKY (governance token) through Wormhole. Recently, they announced an incentive program to launch and activate the Solana DeFi ecosystem, distributing 2 million SKY tokens per week.
PYUSD
PayPal USD (PYUSD) is a stablecoin issued by PayPal in cooperation with Paxos. Like USDT and USDC, it is backed by cash and cash equivalents at a 1:1 ratio and deposited in banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). PayPal announced a strategic partnership with Solana to develop the next generation of digital payment solutions using its fast confirmation, low fees, and token expansion capabilities.
Drift
Drift Protocol is a decentralized trading platform built on Solana, and its V2 upgrade focuses on improving order execution speed and market efficiency. Users can participate in various activities such as spot trading, perpetual trading, lending, and passive liquidity provision, and trade in a market that is updated in real time. Recently, it also launched a prediction market called "BET".
Jupiter
Jupiter is the leading decentralized exchange aggregator on Solana, providing the best and cheapest way to trade on Solana. The platform mainly provides functions such as limit orders, futures trading, dollar cost averaging (DCA), fiat currency entry and bridging. In addition, Jupiter also provides or plans to provide various functions, such as: 1) "LFG Launchpad", which supports the launch of protocols such as Sanctum, Zeus and SharkyFi; 2) "Ape.Pro", a function that simplifies the minting and trading of new tokens, as shown in Pump.fun; and 3) "Easy entry action integration" through solutions such as Apple Pay, credit cards and Google Pay.
Zeta
Zeta Markets is a decentralized derivatives trading protocol built on the Solana blockchain. It provides options and futures trading with low margin requirements, allowing traders to buy and sell options and futures through an order book system.
At the recent Breakpoint event, Zeta announced its testnet (Q4 2024) and mainnet(Q1 2025) timelines for the first superapp on Bullet, a zkVM-compatible layer-2 solution.
Jito
As mentioned above, Jito operates a client called Jito-Solana that focuses on maximizing MEV (maximum extractable value) profits. They are rapidly expanding their share of the Solana ecosystem liquidity staking market through a liquidity staking token, JitoSOL, which allows them to share in the profits generated by their MEV solution. Similar to Lido's approach to running its protocol in a permissionless manner, Jito also plans to apply a permissionless model to the operation of the JitoSOL pool through StakeNet. In July, they released the code for their staking and re-staking program in an open source manner.
Marinade Finance
Marinade Finance is a liquidity staking platform that allows users to delegate their SOL tokens to Marinade in exchange for shadow tokens (i.e. mSOL), which can be used in various DeFi protocols. In a recent Breakpoint event, Marinade previewed its V2 update, which includes improvements to smart contract risks, validator performance, and the introduction of a staking pool market. It also expressed its vision that a wide range of participants from retail to institutions will be able to participate in a more efficient Solana staking market.
Sanctum
Sanctum is a solution that allows all Liquid Staking Token (LST) projects within the Solana ecosystem to share liquidity with each other, allowing each LST to interact seamlessly with each other (e.g., zero slippage), or users can also earn income by providing liquidity for a specific LST to the Sanctum Infinity pool. In addition, Sanctum plans to add two other PayFi-related products - 1) Creator Coins, which will enable organizations and individuals to easily build, grow, and monetize their communities, and 2) Cloud Card, a card product line that allows users to use SOL and various stablecoins in more than 100 countries.
Kamino
Kamino is a DeFi platform that brings together various financial activities, where users can develop strategies to maximize returns through lending, liquidity provision, leveraging provided liquidity, and portfolio management. Together with marginfi, Kamino has the highest TVL among Solana's lending-supported protocols.
marginfi
MarginFi Protocol is a decentralized lending protocol on the Solana network. Its product portfolio includes mrgnlend, an overcollateralized lending protocol. In addition to typical lending activities, MarginFi Protocol focuses on enabling users to integrate with various DeFi protocols using "composable DeFi native protocols".
Fragmetric
Fragmetric is the first liquidity re-staking protocol in the Solana ecosystem, aiming to enhance the liquidity and composability of staked assets. Its main product, fragSOL, is a Solana native liquidity re-staking token (Liquid Restaking Token-LRT) based on the Jito VRT (Vault Receipt Token) system.
Solayer
Solayer is the leading re-staking marketplace in the Solana ecosystem. Solayer has a particular focus on enhancing network bandwidth and enabling on-chain dApps to receive higher transaction priority and block space. Recently, as part of a partnership with OpenEden Labs, it announced support for re-staking SUSDC, a yield-generating stablecoin.
FluxBeam & FluxBot
FluxBeam is the first decentralized exchange (DEX) that supports trading all types of Solana tokens, including SPL, SPL404, and SPL22. Users can perform basic functions such as token swaps, providing liquidity, and bridging assets. In addition, FluxBeam also provides token creation and management tools that enable developers and users to easily handle tokens in the Solana ecosystem. It also provides a Telegram trading robot called FluxBot, which includes functions such as token sniping and copy trading.
Phoenix & OpenBook
Phoenix, developed by the Ellipsis team, is a new order book-based DEX that focuses on providing a fully on-chain, instantly settled trading experience. It competes with OpenBook (a community branch of Serum V3) because both parties provide similar services. Compared with Phoenix, OpenBook places more emphasis on community governance and control.
DRiP
DRiP is an NFT issuance platform focused on supporting new artists to easily and affordably join Solana. New artists who want to build a fan base can mint their work into cNFTs through DRiP and provide free NFT art minting. Users can follow their favorite artists, send thank you notes, or donate through Droplets 2.0.
Magic Eden
Magic Eden is the main NFT trading platform on Solana, and supports multi-chain environments including Ethereum, Polygon, and Bitcoin Inscriptions, providing a launch platform for each project or Bitcoin Inscription. Its upcoming ME token aims to support and promote cross-chain asset transactions of various types.
Tensor
Tensor is a platform tailored for professional NFT traders on Solana that integrates AMM and trading platform functions. Users can access real-time data, NFT AMMs based on candlestick pricing, and adopt various trading strategies including bulk acquisition, bidding, listing/delisting of NFTs. In addition to these features, Tensor also conducts various reward programs for retail users, competing with Magic Eden for the position of the top NFT trading platform.
Recently, Tensor announced the open source release of its entire code, a grant program, a change in its fee model, and a preview of a new product line called vector.fun.
BonkBot
BonkBot is a Telegram trading bot that finds the best token prices across various DEXs on Solana using routing logic developed in partnership with Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter. BonkBot is particularly useful for trading memecoins and small tokens.
Cube.Exchange
Cube.Exchange is a leading hybrid decentralized exchange (HEX) that leverages multi-party computation (MPC) technology to combine off-chain order matching with on-chain settlement, providing an efficient, secure, and compliant trading experience. During a recent Breakpoint, the team revealed plans to launch Isometric Network, an intent-based network built on the technology stack previously applied to Cube.Exchange (i.e. MPC, two-tier validator consensus, multi-chain settlement, etc.).
5.3 Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN)
The Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) uses various incentive mechanisms to crowdsource, operate, and maintain physical infrastructure through a blockchain network.
The core of DePIN's business model lies in the ability to effectively manage and utilize data transmitted through the network's hardware or software infrastructure . For example, Helium facilitates network connectivity in a decentralized environment by transmitting data from IoT devices. IO.NET optimizes data processing for machine learning tasks using a network of GPU/CPU nodes. Hivemapper collects and utilizes geographic data from dashcams to provide mapping services. Since DePIN is data-centric in nature, it requires a strong foundation layer with high transaction throughput, composability, and scalability.
Due to Solana’s ability to process thousands of transactions per second (TPS), low latency, cost-efficiency, and rich ecosystem and developer community, it has become the platform of choice for major existing DePIN projects such as Render Network, Hivemapper, and Helium. Solana’s DePIN space continues to expand and there are already significant adoption cases - a major example is Helium, which more than doubled its mobile user base in 2024, reaching over 100,000 mobile users as of July this year.
Below is a collated list of important developments and milestones achieved in Solana’s “DePIN” space - some projects that fall into both the AI and DePIN fields will be grouped under the AI field for illustration.
Hivemapper
Hivemapper is a global mapping network that uses in-car dashcams to collect real-time, high-resolution road imagery and rewards contributors with its native $HONEY token. Hivemapper had a very busy second quarter and achieved several milestones, such as successfully mapping 25% of the global road network and mapping approximately 28 million kilometers of street-level imagery per month.
Hivemapper delivered 5,605 dashcams in the second quarter and plans to conduct field tests of its next-generation dashcam, the “Bee,” soon.
NATIX
NATIX Network is a DePIN protocol for geospatial data mapping, focusing on solving the problems of data access isolation and high business costs caused by large technology companies monopolizing data. NATIX integrates proprietary AI, edge computing, and economic incentives to crowdsource global cameras to create a global decentralized dynamic map (DDMap).
Ambient Network
Ambient Network is a decentralized infrastructure network for environmental monitoring, focusing on collecting global environmental data to protect the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Ambient has developed a mobile app called AmbiGO, which promotes monitoring of urban air quality, noise levels, and cleanliness by rewarding users for contributing and mapping environmental data.
Shaga
Shaga, a two-time winner of the global DePIN hackathon, is currently developing a P2P cloud gaming platform. By connecting gaming computers around the world to an open, decentralized network driven by gamers, Shaga hopes to improve latency and reduce reliance on large corporations.
375ai
375ai is a DePIN that is building advanced decentralized wireless and edge infrastructure. 375ai launched its first product, 375edge, a sensor and edge AI node that can collect, process and transmit multimodal data such as environmental and traffic data. Network participants can earn token rewards by deploying 375edge and collecting and reporting high-quality data.
Teleport
Teleport's Trip Protocol is a decentralized ride-sharing service built on the Solana network, focusing on solving the centralization problem of existing ride-sharing companies. Through this protocol, drivers can earn higher incomes while passengers can enjoy services at lower costs.
DAWN
Decentralized Autonomous Wireless Networks (DAWN) is a Solana DePIN protocol developed by Andrena. DAWN is a user-driven decentralized wireless network that provides affordable home and business Internet services at multi-gigabit speeds.
Helium
Helium is a 5G wireless network DePIN that migrated to Solana to take advantage of its performance and state compression capabilities, making it easier to identify devices and expand market potential. Users of Helium IoT device hotspots pay network fees (priced in HNT), which are then distributed to hotspot operators. Helium's network is available on a variety of devices, and last year Helium Mobile launched a $20 per month phone plan that provides unlimited data, talk, and text services across the United States.
Additionally, Helium announced the Helium Licensing Program, which allows anyone to produce and sell Helium hotspot devices, enabling individuals to generate income through licensing fees while also helping to grow the Helium network.
GenesysGO
ShdwDrive, developed by GensysGO, is a decentralized cloud storage platform built on the Solana network. It uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) data structure to achieve efficient decentralized data storage, management, and computing.
GenesysGO announced the first decentralized storage network powered entirely by mobile devices at the Solana Crossroads conference in Istanbul. The mobile version of shdwDrive will be integrated into Solana Mobile Chapter 2, which will allow Solana Saga users to turn their devices into decentralized storage nodes and earn rewards in GenesysGO’s native token $SHDW.
Starpower
Starpower is a decentralized energy network (DEN) protocol built on Solana that is building a decentralized energy network by aggregating and utilizing the energy of various distributed energy devices (DER) to form a unified and powerful decentralized energy network that can meet the growing energy needs of artificial intelligence. StarPower has released its first product, StarPlug, which will be used to build its global energy network.
5.4 Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on all walks of life and has attracted widespread attention to generative AI applications such as ChatGPT. However, these developments are mostly dominated by closed-source Web2 companies, both at the infrastructure and model levels. This centralization has prompted the cryptocurrency industry to work on developing open-source alternatives, resulting in a large number of new AI projects last year.
The popularity of decentralized AI has brought great benefits to Solana, and many DePIN and AI projects have chosen to launch on this network. This is mainly due to Solana's technology stack, especially the Sealevel operating environment, which has obvious advantages over other blockchains. Solana's smart contract parallel execution capability allows multiple non-conflicting transactions to be executed simultaneously, effectively optimizing the use of computing hardware such as GPUs and CPUs. This is particularly beneficial for projects that perform large amounts of data and computing processing, because Solana is able to coordinate resource allocation and process transactions at scale, supporting faster and more efficient operations.
While Solana’s AI space is not as mature as DePIN and is still in its infancy, there are three particularly promising areas to focus on: decentralized computing networks, data, and AI agents.
Here’s an overview of important developments in the field of AI in the Solana ecosystem, as well as introductions to projects worth noting.
DAIN Protocol
DAIN Protocol is a decentralized artificial intelligence network consisting of autonomous agents that can communicate, interact, learn and cooperate. It aims to solve the current problem of Internet decentralization by leveraging the collective intelligence of multi-agent systems and providing a unified platform to deploy and use AI agents with multi-module capabilities. DAIN recently released their codeless DeFi AI agent DainTrader to alpha users.
Matrix One
Matrix One is committed to making it easy for anyone to create a personal AI character by providing the necessary interfaces and tools to create multi-module AI agents that can be monetized and integrated in virtual and real world environments. The protocol aims to improve several shortcomings of existing AI character platforms, such as high technical barriers, poor revenue distribution, lack of selectivity and ownership of AI characters. Matrix One minimizes the above problems by providing developers and creators with a set of infrastructure tools (such as character studios, 3D avatar visualizers, model indexes, and markets), making it easier to create, own, and trade tokenized AI characters.
WayFinder AI
Pathfinder AI is a decentralized protocol consisting of autonomous AI agents owned by users, enabling them to navigate and operate in on-chain applications and ecosystems. Pathfinder AI powers Parallel Studios' new game Colony, and the platform hosts AI agents capable of performing various functions, such as creating smart contracts. These agents are able to meet the highly customized needs of users through their advanced memory capabilities.
Grass
Grass is a DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) that aims to democratize AI model training through a decentralized network of incentivized nodes that share unused bandwidth to collect and process network data.
Grass has achieved many successes in the second quarter of this year. First, they successfully open-sourced a user dataset of 600 million Reddit posts and comments on HuggingFace, which is now publicly available for open-source AI training. In addition, Grass desktop nodes are now available for greater efficiency, and Solana wallet addresses have been integrated with users' Grass accounts, ensuring rewards are distributed to nodes when their data is used for AI inference or training tasks.
Synesis One
Data is the cornerstone of AI and needs to be labeled and annotated to improve the quality and accuracy of the underlying models. In the current situation, micro-tasks and providing raw data are paid very little, or data is collected by technology companies without the user's knowledge and authorization. Synesis One is a decentralized Train2Earn platform where anyone can train AI models and get rewards. Users with Kannon NFTs can participate in data crowdsourcing, data labeling, AI training, and other pre-processing tasks and receive rewards as compensation.
Privasea
As AI becomes an integral part of everyday life, questions about digital identity and privacy are rapidly emerging, as sensitive information such as financial information, medical records, and personally identifiable data are increasingly vulnerable to leakage and manipulation.
Privasea is committed to using a variety of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technologies to encrypt and protect this sensitive data. It is worth noting that the Privasea team has developed a dApp called "ImHuman" that allows users to store biometric data locally and encrypt it into NFTs to prove their identity and prevent attacks from malicious robots and programs.
Exabits
Exabits was incubated by Harvard Innovation Lab and is dedicated to developing the "AI-Compute Base Layer" for AI training, reasoning, and fine-tuning.
Kuzco
Kuzco is a decentralized GPU cluster built on Solana that provides scalable and cost-effective inference services for Large Language Models (LLMs). Kuzco’s network requests are growing, new nodes are constantly joining the network, and it is currently being used by DecentAI, developed by Catena, for LLM inference workloads.
Render Network & IO.NET
Render Network is a GPU network focused on providing scalable and cost-effective 3D rendering solutions for artists and businesses, and has achieved continued success through its application OctaneX. OctaneX, powered by Render Network, has been integrated into Apple's latest iPad Pro, featured in Apple's keynote, and also produced the opening credits for the HBO series The Last of Us. Users can provide or utilize computing power to complete complex 3D rendering tasks and use Render tokens for transactions in the process. Render Network uses a Burning Minting Balance (BME) model to balance the supply and demand of tokens and ensure the price stability of its services.
Similar to Render Network, IO.NET is a decentralized GPU computing network based on Solana. Unlike Render Network, IO.NET focuses more on reasoning, parallel learning, hyperparameter tuning, and reinforcement learning. The two projects collaborated in November last year to expand the scale of the GPU vendor market.
5.5 Consumer Applications
As mentioned earlier in the article, many people are skeptical about the future of cryptocurrencies after a series of bankruptcies and events that led to a downturn in the crypto industry in 2022. During this crisis, the industry's focus naturally turned to a more practical perspective on why blockchain should be used, and major mainnet began to discuss solutions to deal with real-world adoption.
Backed by a strong community and developer-friendly technology stack, Solana is once again the most suitable network for these discussions, designed from the ground up for mass adoption. As a result, the Solana network has shown strong growth not only in the previously mentioned areas, but also in consumer applications such as gaming and mobile trading applications.
Below is a short list of “consumer apps” that exemplify Solana’s user-centric approach.
Echelon Prime
Echelon Prime Foundation is a foundation that supports the sci-fi card game Parallel TCG and the strategy survival game Parallel Colony that integrates AI avatars.
STEPN
STEPN is a social lifestyle app built on Solana that is dedicated to connecting people around the world and encouraging an active and healthy lifestyle through its digital NFT sneakers, allowing users to earn rewards while doing various daily activities. At the recent Breakpoint event, a partnership with Adidas was announced, and a minting event for 1,000 pairs of Genesis sneakers was launched at the end of September.
Solchat
Solchat is a communication protocol based on Solana that allows users to make text, voice, and video calls in a Web3 environment. All messages and group chat content are stored on-chain, while voice and video calls are connected P2P via WebRTC. Solchat is expected to be actively used in the upcoming Solana Saga mobile device.
Audius
Audius is a decentralized music sharing platform that builds a bridge between fans and artists, providing users with exclusive access to new music while enabling artists and creators to maintain control of their work and receive fair compensation. Audius has signed licensing agreements with all major US performing rights organizations (PROs), including ASCAP, BMI, GMR, and SESAC.
MetaDAO
The MetaDAO Project is a decision-making market platform built on Solana that leverages the concept of futarchy to enhance governance mechanisms. MetaDAO allows users to participate in governance decisions by trading tokens representing different potential outcomes.
CUDIS
CUDIS is an AI-powered health ring that helps users manage and track their health by monitoring and providing insights into various health metrics such as sleep, steps, and daily activities. CUDIS helps users achieve their health goals through an integrated biometric dashboard, AI coaching, and a points system that rewards users for completing various goals, providing personalized health advice to users. The first round of CUDIS rings sold out, and the second round is now available.
ORE
ORE is a proof-of-work (PoW)-based digital currency for the Solana ecosystem that aims to ensure a fair and accessible mining model. After winning a $50,000 prize at the Solana Renaissance hackathon sponsored by the Solana Foundation, ORE quickly became one of the fastest-growing applications on Solana. In order to cope with the network congestion caused by its rapid growth, the development team launched ORE V2, set a fixed supply of 21 million tokens, and continuously improved it to enhance network performance and consolidate token value.
DeStreet
DeStreet is a social trading app that won second place in the DAO and Community track of the Solana Renaissance Hackathon and first place in the Bonkathon. The dApp allows traders to create, discover and share trades on social media by simply sharing a link. Trade initiators will receive 20% of the total profits, and users can subscribe to their favorite influencers to automatically follow their trades, adding an element of gamification and social prestige.
DFlow
DFlow is a non-custodial mobile trading platform based on Solana, focusing on accelerating the popularity of on-chain transactions from the application and infrastructure level through its mobile trading application and liquidity aggregator. DFlow's mobile application has recently been officially launched and is now available for download on iOS and Android platforms.
Follows.App
Follows.App is a social trading platform based on Solana that innovates in the creator economy through Creator-Fi. The app allows fans (users) to support and invest in their favorite influencers by buying and selling "Follows", providing fans with a unique experience while bringing new monetization opportunities to creators.
5.6 Community and Culture
La Masia, FC Barcelona's youth academy, is known for producing world-class players like Messi, Xavi and Iniesta. Not only have they achieved great things in their own right, they have also won multiple championships for the club while generating millions of dollars in revenue for the club through ticket and merchandise sales. Just like soccer academies, blockchain communities are essential to developing grassroots talent, building a shared culture, and driving growth and success.
Like La Masia in Barcelona, Solana has built one of the most vibrant communities in crypto. This community is made up of passionate Solana network advocates, entrepreneurs, developers, and investors. Through multiple initiatives such as hackathons and grant programs, it plays an important role in attracting and nurturing key talent, who continue to bring innovation and growth to the Solana ecosystem, forming a virtuous cycle.
Many key projects in the Solana ecosystem, such as Tensor, JITO, Mango, Tiplink, and Dialect, were born out of Solana’s hackathons. Driven by a deep loyalty to Solana, these projects have now grown to a scale that attracts new users, partners, and external capital to the Solana network. They also contribute to the cyclical growth of the Solana ecosystem by sponsoring various hackathons. In addition, Solana’s NFT and meme projects, such as Solana Monkey Business (SMB), Mad Lads, Bonk, and PONKE, started out as pure art or meme-driven expressions. However, these projects gradually gathered a group of people who identified with the Solana ideals, grew into larger communities, and launched various efforts to promote the development of the ecosystem. For example, MonkeDAO has hosted global meetups and co-managed grant programs with the Solana Foundation and Metaplex, while Bonk has partnered with Radiants and Phase Labs to organize the Bonkathon, offering $300,000 in prizes to promote ecosystem innovation.
Below is an overview of several projects and teams that are shaping Solana’s culture and community.
Bonk
Bonk is a dog-themed meme coin that symbolizes the resilience of the Solana ecosystem and was launched as a Christmas gift on December 25, 2022. As mentioned earlier, Bonk has contributed to the revitalization of the ecosystem through various initiatives, including hosting hackathons and launching projects such as BonkBot and Bonkswap. In addition, in a recent Breakpoint announcement, they revealed the upcoming launch of the BONK ETP in the United States.
dogwifhat
Dogwifcoin is a Shiba Inu-themed meme coin featuring real-life dog Achi wearing a pink furry hat. It launched in November, quickly gained popularity, and is currently the largest meme token on Solana by market cap.
MOTHER
MOTHER is a memecoin and community co-founded by famous rapper Iggy Azalea. Initially, it started purely out of curiosity about cryptocurrency. However, the unique characteristics of the memecoin community and Iggy's active participation created a synergy. Now, MOTHER aims to become a "godmother" to help the public approach the cryptocurrency field in a more interesting and familiar way. Through various initiatives, MOTHER has rapidly expanded its influence and has become one of the fastest growing communities. In November this year, MOTHER plans to launch Motherland, a crypto casino where users can play slots, poker, and participate in sports betting.
Fidelion
Fidelion is an NFT project set in a dieselpunk post-apocalyptic world in 2080. The project continues to expand its IP through excellent storytelling and branding. Fidelion has also launched a passive game using NFTs and a mobile game called Mega Road.
Mad Lads
The Mad Lads series is built on the xNFT standard and explores the potential of NFT as a decentralized application. The launch of Mad Lads injected new vitality into the community when the FTX collapse caused the Solana community to fall into trouble.
SMB and MonkeDAO
MonkeDAO is the first NFT DAO on Solana, which evolved from the decentralized community that began around Solana Monkey Business (an NFT collection) in 2021. This organization is actively involved in various initiatives, including operating Solana validators, operating a staking pool (i.e. SOL), hosting online events, and investing in early projects, all of which are 100% managed by the community. Through these efforts, MonkeDAO has made a significant contribution to the early success and sustainable growth of the Solana NFT market.
LamportDAO
LamportDAO is a community-driven initiative focused on supporting developers in the Solana ecosystem. As of this writing, it has over 4,000 members and is actively helping to onboard new developers to the ecosystem by providing developer resources, supporting technical development, evangelizing Solana features, and organizing Solana-specific hackathons.
Superteam DAO
Superteam DAO is a global community of founders, developers, grantees, and other stakeholders collaborating to grow and incubate new innovative projects in the Solana ecosystem. Superteam is a truly international organization, fostering global talent through its 10+ different country chapters, including Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, Vietnam, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Malaysia, Canada, and Japan.
Colosseum
Colosseum is an accelerator platform backed by the Solana Foundation that hosts competitive hackathons and provides critical support to early-stage startups in the Solana ecosystem. Hackathon winners will be accepted into the Colosseum program, where they will receive help with product launches, networking opportunities with top venture capitalists, and a $250,000 grant.
Colosseum hosted the Solana Renaissance Hackathon, which had over 8,300 participants and 1,070 project submissions from 95+ countries, covering areas such as infrastructure, games, DePIN, DAO, DeFi, and numerous consumer applications.
Cubik
Cubik is a decentralized, community-driven platform in the Solana ecosystem that provides support and funding for open source projects and digital public goods. One of Cubik’s key features is the use of a Quadratic Funding (QF) model that amplifies the impact of individual donations, ensuring that projects with more community support receive proportionally more funding from the matching pool.
Solana Foundation
The Solana Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing grants, funding, and resources to developers, projects, and initiatives to foster the growth and development of the Solana ecosystem.
Solana University
Solana University is an international student organization dedicated to promoting understanding of Solana and Web3 through various events and educational materials.
Breakpoint
Breakpoint is an annual event organized by the Solana Foundation that brings together industry experts, artists, developers, and community members. The event lasts for several days and offers a diverse and engaging schedule of talks and workshops. This year's Breakpoint was held in Singapore on September 20 and 21, and next year's Breakpoint is expected to be held in Abu Dhabi in December.
Crossroads
Crossroads is an annual community conference held in Istanbul, Turkey. The purpose of Solana Crossroads is to connect Solana's global community members and provide networking opportunities, presentations, and in-depth insights into the latest developments in the Solana ecosystem. This year's Crossroads was a success, attracting more than 3,000 attendees and more than 50 speakers.
mtndao
mtndao is a hacker house for developers in the Solana ecosystem that takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah, for about a month. The event offers a variety of activities such as hackathons, coding sessions, networking events, and even ski trips. Participants work on developing new projects and compete for prizes and rewards.
Solana Summit
Solana Summit is the largest gathering of Solana founders, creators, and developers in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, focused on building connections and strengthening the community among Solana enthusiasts. The most recent Solana Summit was held in Malaysia from June 20-22 this year, with more than 750 attendees from 55 countries, more than 95 speakers, and workshop hosts participating in the event.
Lightspeed
Lightspeed is a podcast hosted by Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz and Blockworks reporter Jack Kubinec, focusing on innovative projects that use cryptocurrency to solve real-world problems. The show invites founders and developers working on platforms such as Solana to interview, and the topics discussed are mainly related to technology and the current state of the cryptocurrency market.
SolanaFloor
SolanaFloor, powered by Step Finance, is the leading Solana news and media hub covering the latest developments and news in the Solana ecosystem.
Validated
Validated is one of the premium Solana-related podcasts hosted by Austin Federa of the Solana Foundation, where he discusses topics such as the future of the network, blockchain, and Web3 technology with guests from all walks of life.
6. Like an Apple? No, it's much more than that
Many people, including Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, call Solana the "Apple of cryptocurrencies," emphasizing its harmonious integration of hardware and software, as well as its high attention to performance and user experience. Such metaphors may make it easier for us to understand Solana's vision. However, ironically, what really makes Solana more compelling is not its similarities with Apple, but its differences - Solana and Apple's strategies are diametrically opposed.
Apple’s core business is selling hardware, and software is mainly used as an auxiliary tool to promote hardware sales. Even when the iPod was released, Apple promoted its success by integrating software iTunes with the hardware experience. Solana has taken the exact opposite direction, with the goal of integrating hardware to create a Web3 experience that allows many fully composable applications to be organically connected to each other. Therefore, compared to Apple’s approach, Solana’s approach is not only more sophisticated, but also shows greater ambition. It is committed not only to innovation through a convenient user experience, but also hopes to bring a new experience through the software itself.
Ultimately, technology is worthless if it cannot be actually applied. Simply put, one of the main values we expect from blockchain is that it can become an innovative network infrastructure to supplement and enhance the operation of systems in the real world.
While Bitcoin and Ethereum have painted an ideal blueprint for the future of blockchain, Solana is exploring how to implement these visions into reality and actively promote the development of practical cases. Perhaps we have been too focused on the blockchain trilemma defined by Vitalik in the past, limiting our imagination of the potential of each blockchain. However, the protocols that will ultimately create the most value will be those that most deeply understand the needs of users and developers and successfully provide corresponding experiences.
I’d like to give special thanks to Joe McCann, Richard_ISC, Yash Agarwal, Chaerin Kim, and Ted Schoett for their important contributions to the “Notable Projects in the Solana Ecosystem” section of this article.
Disclaimer
The following article was written with support from the Solana Foundation. This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, business, investment, or tax advice. It should not be used as the basis for any investment decision, nor should it be relied upon for accounting, legal, or tax guidance. References to specific assets or securities are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation or endorsement. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliate, organization, or individual. Opinions reflected in this article are subject to change without notice.
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