Author: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher
"More than 6,000 tickets were sold out, with representatives from more than 114 countries and regions participating. More than 70 Solana-related products shared their latest developments and actions, covering DeFi, DePIN, Games and other fields." This was Solana's official on-site summary of the Breakpoint event overview.
At the conference, traditional financial institutions such as Franklin Templeton, Forge, a subsidiary of Societe Generale, and Citibank announced that they have established partnerships with Solana. The SOL token also performed exceptionally well during the conference, with daily gains exceeding 10%.
The large number of participants and projects made the Breakpoint conference attract industry attention and become the most discussed topic at the Token2049 conference. It was once considered the most eye-catching summit event in the crypto industry this year.
After the Breakpoint conference, a large amount of funds began to flow into the Solana ecosystem in search of new opportunities. According to the latest cross-chain data from SolanaFloor on September 23, in the past 7 days, more than 50 million US dollars of funds have been transferred from various blockchain networks to the Solana network. Among them, the amount of cross-chain transfers from Ethereum reached 34 million US dollars, accounting for nearly 70% of the total cross-chain amount.
However, for ordinary users, they are more concerned about what opportunities there are for Solana and its ecosystem to participate in after the Breakpoint conference, and how to capture more Alpha?
Since Pyth, Jupiter, Wormhole, Drift and other ecosystem-native projects have successively issued coins and airdropped, the impression that the Solana ecosystem has left on users is mainly based on the hype of MEME coins. However, in this Breakpoint conference, more than 70 Solana-related projects participated and announced the latest progress of related products, such as Eclipse will be mainnet at the end of October, the perpetual cooperation agreement Flash Trade will launch the token FLASH later this year, and the NFT platform Magic Eden's ME token will be launched on Solana, etc.
New changes in Solana : Payment track & Blink & FireDancer
Since the beginning of 2024, Solana's ecological hot spots have been attracting attention from the crypto market. First, at the beginning of the year, projects such as Helium Mobile popularized the DePIN concept and made it an independent track. At the same time, the wealth effect brought by the airdrop of Solana mobile phone Saga tokens continued; then under the AI wave, new decentralized GPU projects such as io.net emerged in an endless stream; in March, the emergence of MEME coin BOME attracted a large number of users and funds to Solana to find the next MEME coin wealth code, and also completely ignited the hype of MEME coins on its chain. Among them, the most noteworthy is the birth of the meme coin issuance platform Pump.fun, which also led to the development of the DeFi ecosystem on the Solana chain.
In addition to the surprises that the ecosystem brings every once in a while, the Solana network has also been constantly launching new features and exploring new opportunities. However, the optimization of the underlying infrastructure is not as easily perceived by users as the development of ecological applications.
At the end of January this year, the token expansion function introduced by Solana made it possible for traditional finance to be put on the chain and opened up new opportunities for it to develop the payment track.
Solana Token Extensions is a feature that allows additional functionality to be added to tokens. It supports developers in integrating features such as private transfers, custom transfer logic, and transaction fees into the assets they issue. It provides developers, enterprises, and traditional financial institutions with a complete set of on-chain token service solutions designed to help enterprises provide more efficient security and compliance services on the Solana network.
Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin, mentioned in his speech at Token2049 that Solana's token extension function can provide many features for payment companies or major global asset issuers, such as built-in revenue function, confidential transfer function (hiding senders and receivers), asset issuance and revocation functions, etc. These functions are developed based on the direct needs of payment companies and Wall Street, and can enable regulated traditional financial companies to achieve large-scale chain-based operations. The stablecoin PYUSD deployed by Paypal on Solana uses the token extension function to provide users with a "confidential transfer" function.
Multicoin expects that the token expansion function will become one of Solana’s signature features in the next 3 to 4 years, at which time it will make Solana stand out among many blockchain projects.
Crypto stablecoin developer Paxos and financial company GMO have built their own stablecoin USDP and regulated Japanese yen stablecoin GYEN respectively through Solana's token expansion function.
The introduction of token expansion functions has accelerated Solana’s development in crypto payment infrastructure and is also an important technical support for the implementation of the Payfi concept.
In addition, at the Breakpoint conference, Solana focused on the new feature Blink, the client Firedancer, and the introduction of ZK Compression technology, which are important iterative features in the Solana 2.0 phase released in the middle of the year.
Among them, the Blinks (link) plug-in function mainly refers to the ability to directly convert Dapp and chain operations such as voting and transaction interactions into shareable website links, so that any website and page can insert these links and directly conduct related transactions. For example, on the X platform, users can add related links generated by Blink to their tweets, so that users can directly purchase tokens, pay, donate or vote, etc., making Solana chain transactions simpler, lowering the threshold for users to enter the world of cryptocurrency, and reaching more users, allowing users to participate in cryptocurrency transactions and applications in their daily environment.
In July this year, the Solana Foundation also announced a $400,000 funding program for Blinks open source tool developers to attract developers to build related tools and facilities to increase activity in the ecosystem.
ZK Compression technology enables developers to utilize Solana's ledger space in a more economical way. The application of this technology can effectively reduce the demand for on-chain storage space, thereby reducing costs and improving overall scalability. It is reported that this technology saves Solana developers about 1,000 times the cost of the original. By adopting ZK Compression technology, the Solana ecosystem can process large amounts of data more efficiently, helping developers and users build applications on a large scale.
Firedancer is a new generation of high-performance validator client developed by market maker Jump Trading, which can eliminate single point failure risks and enhance the overall robustness of the network.
Multicoin said that the Jump team has applied all the knowledge and experience it has accumulated in building high-performance trading systems to this client, which will provide the Solana network with extremely strong scalability and speed, and will accelerate the realization of Solana's vision of building a decentralized Nasdaq.
From this point of view, the token expansion function gives traditional finance the opportunity to go on-chain, and the cooperation with PayPal makes encrypted payments truly feasible; Blinks is a set of development tools that facilitate developers to integrate applications, making encrypted applications as easy to use and spread as Web2 applications; and Firedancer makes the transaction experience smoother by improving network performance; ZK Compression is mainly committed to reducing developers' development costs.
Overall, this series of actions is committed to lowering the development threshold for developers and the usage threshold for users, paving the way for Solana to move towards large-scale applications.
How do users participate in the Solana ecosystem?
In addition to improvements in network performance and infrastructure, Solana is also actively promoting ecological layout and project innovation. First of all, while Solana is developing native Web3 products such as DeFi and games on the chain, it is also making great efforts in areas such as DePIN and Payfi.
Taking the Solana Mobile phone series as an example, this not only provides a direct distribution channel for the DePIN project and helps solve the initial user acquisition problem, but will also become Payfi’s payment center and an important entry point to DeFi.
How can we participate in Solana's opportunities and capture more Alpha?
For users, in addition to paying attention to the optimization of the Solana network itself and the benefits of the SOL token, they also need to pay attention to its ecological projects and their dynamics.
At the Breakpoint conference, 75 Solana ecosystem products released their latest developments, covering payment, DeFi, DePIN, LST, RWA, AI and other fields.
For more details on each product, please refer to Breakpoint 2024: Kaito's Ultimate Alpha-Packed Summary of Product Keynotes .
In the DeFi field, SKY (formerly known as MakerDAO), the largest decentralized stablecoin protocol on Ethereum, announced in Token2049 that it will launch an upgraded stablecoin USDS and governance token SKY on Solana, and allocate 2 million SKY liquidity incentive rewards to the Solana DeFi protocol that integrates USDS and SKY every week. This means that DeFi users participating at that time may also receive SKY token rewards.
Among Solana's native DeFi projects, DEX aggregator Jupiter not only acquired the blockchain browser Solana FM, but also acquired Coinhall, the number one DEX aggregator on Cosmos, and added a new MEME coin issuance function Ape Mint, etc.; the perpetual cooperation agreement Flash Trade will launch the token FLASH later this year; the LST agreement Sanctum has launched a payment card; the lending agreement Kamino plans to release version V2 and will introduce a new spot leverage function in the next few weeks; the perpetual contract platform Zeta Markets launched the decentralized exchange ZEX, and the DEX aggregator Ranger will launch a perpetual contract function, etc.
In the field of stablecoins, the stablecoin infrastructure Perena launched Numeraire, a trading platform specifically for stablecoins; LST protocol Solayer announced a partnership with Open Eden to launch SUSD, a yield-generating stablecoin supported by RWA asset collateral; the stablecoin PHPC launched by the Philippine crypto exchage Coins.ph will be launched on the Solana network next quarter, etc.
In the NFT and gaming sectors, the ME token of the NFT platform Magic Eden will be launched on Solana; the content creation platform DRiP will launch a public beta version on iOS and Android; the survival simulation game Colony will release a closed alpha version in early 2025; the NFT financial protocol Tensor market fees are set to 50% belong to the developer and 50% to its foundation treasury; the open world game platform FrodoBots launched the treasure hunt game Earth Rovers, and so on.
Judging from the quality of the participating projects, many of them are new projects with average popularity in this Breakpoint event. Users need to carefully review these projects in many aspects when choosing them.
In addition, according to the encrypted data platform Rootdata, since September, eight projects in the Solana ecosystem have publicly announced that they have received financing, with a total fundraising amount of more than US$66 million.
Among them, the developer platform Helius and the derivatives trading platform Drift have each completed financing of more than 20 million US dollars, the game MagicBlock and the on-chain mining project Ore have each raised 3 million US dollars, the smart device manufacturer Cudis has completed 5 million US dollars in financing, the creator platform DRiP has completed 8 million US dollars in seed round financing, the yield optimization protocol Carrot has completed 600,000 US dollars, and the edge computing open layer Gradient Network has completed a new round of financing.
Developers can participate in Solana Labs' incubator Solana Incubator. The relevant person in charge said that Solana Incubator is looking for 4 to 6 teams to join its cultivation plan, including existing Solana ecological project teams, Web3 teams considering the Solana network, and Web2 teams integrating Web3. Currently, the incubator is in the second application period, which ends on October 4. It is reported that participating teams will be provided with participation in product development, design and listing planning, fundraising and venture capital support, etc.
