A Solana Summer: The Best Performing and Upcoming Projects on Solana Post FTX

Introduction

Solana has recently made updates to their blockchain, including the switch from a UDP-based protocol to Google's QUIC protocol, the introduction of stake-weighting for transaction prioritization, and the development of fee markets for users to indicate transaction urgency. These enhancements aim to manage network congestion, ensure less failed transactions and better user flexibility.

These advancements have the potential to bring Solana back from the depths by boosting transaction speed, efficiency, and adaptability. The shift to the QUIC protocol could notably enhance transaction speed and reliability, making Solana a compelling platform for applications needing high-speed computations, data storage, or transactions. The stake-weighting implementation and fee market development could disrupt the conventional processing model, by offering a more balanced and user-friendly platform.

Now is the perfect time to keep exploring upcoming projects on Solana, given its recent enhancements and the growing underestimation of the platform. These improvements have enhanced Solana's likelihood of improving, making it an appealing platform for new projects. Moreover, crypto users are overlooking Solana, which offers investors to engage with the platform at a potentially lower cost before it gains broader recognition. This makes it the perfect time to research and invest in the top projects on Solana built post-FTX.

Best new and upcoming Solana Projects

Drift Protocol

Drift Protocol is an open-source, decentralized exchange built on the Solana blockchain. It offers transparent and non-custodial trading of cryptocurrencies. By depositing collateral into Drift Protocol, users can engage in a variety of activities. These include trading perpetual swaps with up to 10x leverage, borrowing or lending at variable rate yields, staking/providing liquidity, and swapping spot tokens.

The protocol's suite of DeFi tools is powered by Drift's robust cross-margined risk engine. This engine is designed to provide traders with a balance of capital efficiency and protection. Each tool within the protocol extends functionality without over-extending risk.

For example, the borrow/lend markets enable cross-collateral on perpetual futures and more efficient margin trading on spot assets. Every deposited token is eligible for yield on deposits from borrows and provides margin for perpetual swaps. Borrowers can only borrow from depositors in an over-collateralized fashion while passing multiple safety measures.

Drift Protocol's orderbook, liquidity, and liquidation layer are powered by a validator-like Keeper Network. Keepers are a network of agents and market-makers incentivized to provide the best order execution to traders on Drift. They can route orders throughout the multi-sourced liquidity mechanisms designed to scale effectively and offer competitive pricing even with larger order sizes.

Zeta Markets

Zeta Markets is a decentralized derivatives exchange that features under-collateralized Perpetual Swaps trading built atop a globally distributed, fully on-chain orderbook. The key features of Zeta Markets include:

• USDC margined, full self custody of assets.
• Up to 20x leverage.
• Fully on-chain central limit orderbook (CLOB) for superior price and execution versus AMMs.
• Programmatic connectivity to their smart contract using their SDK / CPI programs.
• Leaderboard, referrals, and trading rewards.

Zeta Markets has made innovative technical design choices that underpin its exchange architecture. Traditionally, exchanges in DeFi have been limited by the underlying infrastructure, with blockchains being too slow to facilitate the transaction volume required to create an experience similar to that of a centralized exchange. This has resulted in DeFi trading experiences that diverge significantly from the centralized experience. Zeta Markets aims to change this.

Zeta Markets has chosen the Solana blockchain for its high performance. Solana provides high transactional throughput (50,000 p/s), low fees (less than $0.1), and fast settlement times (400ms blocks). It does this while still maintaining the necessary security and decentralization. This allows Zeta Markets to build a decentralized exchange as performant as a centralized exchange.

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Meteora

Meteora is a Solana project that focuses on giving users an easier experience focused on yield farming and liquidity provision. Built on a new tech stack Meteora offers a range of unique features and benefits. These include a user friendly interface, risk management tools, and a better infrastructure.

One of the key innovations of Meteora is its approach to yield farming. The platform uses different algorithms to reward its liquidity providers. These incentives ensure that users receive their maximum possible return on investment.

Meteora also offers risk management tools. These include a risk assessment system and rewards of the different investment strategies. The platform also provides stop-loss orders and automated rebalancing features.

Meteora is a Solana project that focuses on giving users an easier experience focused on yield farming and liquidity provision. The platform is built on a new tech stack t offer a range of unique features and benefits. These include a user friendly interface, risk management tools, and a better infrastructure.alue for the token through commissions from lending pool yields and MET staking rewards.t

Kamino Finance

Kamino Finance is a platform that aims to enhance the functionality of Concentrated Liquidity Market Makers (CLMMs). CLMMs, first introduced by Uniswap v3, create deep liquidity for token pairs and require less capital to do so.

However, they pose complexities that often prevent liquidity providers from profiting from their positions. Kamino Finance addresses these issues by providing automated management strategies that remove the complexity of maintaining a CLMM position.

The platform's key innovation is its liquidity vaults, which automate the management of CLMM positions. These vaults eliminate the need for liquidity providers to manually rebalance their positions to stay within the "perfect" price range. This makes it easier for users to earn returns on their CLMM positions. At present, Kamino Finance does not offer its token. Thus, engaging with Kamino Finance at this early stage could potentially lead to rewards down the line.

Currently, Kamino Finance is a tokenless protocol that just launched a reward point system for users who stake lend, and borrow tokens using the platform. The point system increases at a proportional rate of 1 point daily for every daily staked on the platform.

This is a system to strategically create value for users utilizing the Kamino finance and this might be a strategy to allocate the protocol's token shortly. Kamino positions to be one of the most innovative protocols with the boost system which it will be introducing as well where users can be points boost relative to how they use Solana ecosystem products

Check out the tweet below to get full details on the Kamino's point new mechanism:

Marinade Finance

Marinade Finance is a non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on the Solana blockchain. It offers a simple, secure, and seamless way to stake SOL tokens across more than 130 of the best Solana validators. The platform uses an automated delegation strategy to diversify your portfolio and decentralize the network.

Marinade's innovation lies in its ability to unlock liquidity while earning staking rewards. Users receive a liquid token, mSOL, in return for staking SOL. This mSOL token automatically increases in value with staking rewards and can be used freely all around the Solana ecosystem and its projects. This means you can participate in DeFi or swap back to SOL at any time, providing flexibility and freedom for your staked assets.

Marinade Finance has its own governance token, MNDE. The MNDE token represents fractional ownership in the Marinade DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). By locking MNDE tokens, users can mint a unique Chef NFT and participate in the governance of the Marinade protocol. This includes controlling the use of the treasury, the delegation strategy, and electing the executive team.

As of now, the total value locked (TVL) in Marinade Finance is approximately $162.2 million, with a total of 683,974 SOL staked. The APY for staking SOL is currently 6.90%.

In terms of token distribution, Marinade has taken a community-centric approach. The MNDE token was released to decentralize the ownership of the Marinade protocol and put it in the hands of the community. As of today, MNDE has only been distributed through liquidity mining or as compensation to contributors.

Jito Labs

Jito Labs is a prominent Solana MEV Infrastructure Company, dedicated to developing high-performance systems that optimize the Solana blockchain's performance and enhance validator rewards. The company's primary mission is to minimize negative externalities while enabling validators and stakers to maximize their MEV rewards.

Jito Labs has introduced a client software on the Solana network, marking the first third-party validator client for Solana. This software represents a significant enhancement to Solana's validator software, enabling more efficient transaction and bundle processing. This helps both validators and searchers to effectively identify and exploit MEV opportunities while eliminating unproductive network spam.

The company also operates a stake pool, allowing users to stake their Solana tokens in exchange for a liquid stake pool token (JitoSOL). This innovative approach enables users to earn from both staking rewards and MEV rewards simultaneously. This staking product has significantly increased Jito's share in liquid staking, with the total value locked in Solana's liquid staking protocols, including Jito, experiencing a significant surge.

Jito Labs has developed a suite of products, including the Jito-Solana Client, Jito Block Engine, Jito Relayer, Jito Bundles, Jito Mempool, and ShredStream. These products aim to help node operators earn more revenue, build the most profitable and efficient blocks, outsource spam mitigation and signature verification, unlock sequential execution of transactions, and save hundreds of milliseconds by receiving shreds directly from leaders.

MarginFi

MarginFi, also known as mrgn, is a comprehensive ecosystem that includes a protocol, an interface, and a company. MRGN, Inc is the company that initially developed the Margin Fi protocol. It also developed associated web interfaces, software development kits (SDKs), data analytics, and risk management systems.

The Margin Fi protocol is a suite of persistent smart contracts that together create a composable DeFi-native prime brokerage. This protocol facilitates peer-to-peer lending and portfolio management of trader positions across blockchains. Mrgnlend is an overcollateralized borrow/lend protocol embedded within Margin Fi. It's the only product in the Margin Fi ecosystem today. Mrgnlend allows users to borrow and lend.

MarginFi recently released their new points system,this single-window functionality offers users an easy way to earn points on mrgnlend through lending and borrowing of assets, and by referring new users.

Although all points are equal in value, some activities offer more potential for earning. For example, while a lending point is equal to a borrowing point, users can accrue borrowing points with less capital, effectively incentivizing them to deposit capital into the app for borrowing or lending on the Solana network.Moreover, there's an ongoing speculation within the user community that these earned points might convert into a token airdrop in the future.

Squads Protocol

Squads Protocol is a crypto company operations platform designed to simplify the management of developer and treasury assets for teams building projects on Solana and SVM. It allows teams to secure their treasuries, programs, validators, tokens, and NFT collections in a multisig, enabling joint management. Squads Protocol is an open-source, formally verified, and immutable smart contract wallet infrastructure for Solana and SVM, powering the multi-signature aspect of Squads.

The platform transforms experiences that previously required developers to interact with the CLI into well-designed user flows within an intuitive interface. It enhances security by decentralizing control over assets among the team, removing single points of failure. Squads Protocol also increases transparency by requiring multisig approvals for asset management, parsing relevant data in a human-readable format, and providing stakeholders with more visibility and approval rights for critical actions. Squads Protocol is built for teams, NFT projects, and DAOs operating on Solana and SVM.

Ellipsis Labs

Ellipsis Labs is the team behind Phoenix, a decentralized limit order book on Solana that supports markets for spot assets. Phoenix is designed as a composable liquidity hub, serving as a public good for all of DeFi. It allows developers to build on-chain applications that either post liquidity to or draw liquidity from the canonical liquidity source.

Phoenix offers several technical features that set it apart. It has instant settlement, meaning it doesn't require an asynchronous crank to settle trades, unlike existing order books on Solana. It is maximally composable, with sensible interfaces and a small number of required accounts, allowing traders to fit more instructions into a single transaction. Phoenix also cleanly exposes data, writing all market events on-chain, making it easy for traders to query the full live and historical state of all Phoenix markets.

Phoenix is committed to decentralization. The Phoenix program source will be made public before the mainnet launch, and the deployed version will be a verified build. Market listings are permissionless and no admin controls will exist on the Phoenix program. The Ellipsis Labs team will control the initial program upgrade authority via multisig, with plans to renounce the upgrade authority once the program has been battle-tested.

Parcl

Parcl is a decentralized real estate trading platform. Parcl offers city indexes that allow you to speculate on price movements of real estate markets. Parcl effectively combines elements from traditional Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and synthetic asset protocols, creating a simple yet efficient synthetic asset AMM. In the context of exchange smart contract protocols, an AMM typically employs mathematical functions to determine prices. On the other hand, synthetic asset protocols use collaterals to offer synthetic exposure, rely on oracles to get underlying price information, and use on-chain mechanisms to enable settlement at the underlying price.

One standout feature of Parcl v2 is the introduction of isolated pools. These are unique markets that allow traders to gain exposure to a price feed, while liquidity providers can offer liquidity. Each pool maintains its unique long-short skew and funding rate. Another key innovation is the solvency enforcement mechanism. At the time of pool creation, the exchange rate between the pool's collateral token (often a stablecoin like USDC) and its liquidity token is set. This rate serves as the "bonding curve" for the model. Solvency is upheld as the liquidity tokens are used to calculate trader performance and payout. Unlike the traditional dollar-for-dollar accounting model, this unique model ensures that positions are converted into collateral based on the pool's resources.

Price execution is another notable feature. All positions are opened and closed at the current price of a pool's oracle price feed. This ensures that positions maintain their price peg, as they can only be managed with the core smart contract. Lastly, Parcl v2 eliminates credit risk by not allowing margin borrowing. Instead, traders can opt for leverage up to 10x to deal with price movements. To counterbalance this risk, the pool provides compensation through long-short funding and skew impact fees.

HomebaseDAO

Homebase is a real estate project on Solana, aiming to be the preferred platform for tenants looking to move to a new city. Instead of searching Craigslist for available apartments, a tenant moving to San Francisco might use the Homebase platform to find available flats. If people find a suitable property, they can move in and buy 10 to 20% of the available shares. Like this they can become a partial owner of their new home.

Until now, reality has been totally different. Homeownership is becoming more difficult to obtain than ever before, indicating that the American dream is vanishing. If we look back, real estate has been a safe and long-term bet for the accumulation of wealth. After all, the average US home appreciating by at least 30% over any ten-year period.

However, rising property prices have started to outpace rising wages. Now, the median home price to income ratio in America is at an unprecedented 7.78x. To afford a home, the average person would need to save their whole gross earnings for eight years. This is a huge rise from the previous ratio of 4.2x.

Put simply, many people cannot afford a home anymore. The situation is grave, as mortgage rates rise above 6% and property prices reaching all-time highs. While many wish to get in real estate they lack the financial means to get mortgages let alone to pay in cash.

Symmetry

Symmetry is a DeFi management protocol that is set to revolutionize the management of assets for users. Symmetry records over 400k transactions, $500m+ trading volume, and 100k users, making it possible for users to create indexes for DeFi tokens.

Traditionally, indexes were created to manage a composition of various assets, and when an index is bought, the performance of the purchased index depends on the composition of its underlying assets.

This same strategy used by the developers of Symmetry makes it possible for users to create indexes, set rebalancing strategies for their actively managed funds, and even buy already created actively managed funds. Users can decide to create their vault and buy and hold their underlying assets.

In the same vein, symmetry makes it possible for flexible settings for rebalancing threshold - which is the percentage for which the composition of the asset should be rebalanced to avoid the weight of a poorly performing token bringing down the overall performance of the actively managed fund and also the rebalancing interval - which on default is set to 1day interval.

The tokens available to be added to an actively managed fund are all SPL tokens. This is a good bet for Solana tokens, as the Solana DeFi ecosystem has also plummeted in price and will be a good gain for indexes created using Symmetry.

Obtaining a strategy to leverage Solana's growth shouldn't be much of a hurdle as you can easily create an index on Symmetry and keep track of its general performance.

Ondo Finance

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The real-world asset narratives deals with the tokenization of real-world assets and backing the value of a tokenized asset to the underlying product or service.

Ondo Finance leverages this possibility through blockchain to provide tokenization to institutional-grade financial products and services. An example of a tokenized cash equivalent product of Ondo Finance is the USDY- U.S Dollar Yield Token, OUSG - Ondo Short-Term US Government Treasuries, and OMMF- Ondo US Money Markets.

Where the solutions brought by these products are tokenized notes secured by short-term US Treasuries and bank demand deposits, and cash equivalents representing membership/equity interests. As its primary goal is to make this available for the general public and not just US Citizens, users can buy these tokenized funds via certain blockchain networks. Solana is one of these few networks where these tokenized funds can be invested in.

This innovation shows and reflects on the vast adoption of the Solana network from Circle's USDC to tokenized backed securities. Upon approval of KYC, the deposit tab is made available and users can buy from these cash equivalents and start earning as they hold.

Mango Markets

Mango Markets is a Solana decentralized exchange that provides the services of perpetual trading, spot and leverage trading for Solana users.

The Mango Market's functional mechanism for perpetual trading is backed by its order book, while its spot trading feature utilizes the OPENBOOK DEX which was launched in response to the security breaches by the FTX collapse.

Mango Market uses a Serum v3 fork to let users long or short on the future of an underlying asset. Mango Markets also helps users to lend and borrow assets with collateral with a watch filter known as health on this platform to ensure the users know the weighted amount of risk and closure to liquidations.

Final Thoughts

These top projects show the Solana ecosystem's innovation has been ongoing despite recent setbacks. Among the uses that are possible are decentralized exchanges and real estate investment platforms. These initiatives all place a strong emphasis on user rewards and community engagement. These projects also show a commitment to solving current problems and enhancing user experience at Solana.

Despite FTX and Alameda's setbacks, both initiatives are still expanding on Solana, demonstrating the ecosystem's adaptability and potential. The current undervaluation of Solana offers investors and developers an unbalanced wager. Solana may go unnoticed by the greater crypto world, but these applications show that development on this platform is still going strong. The ongoing innovation and growth of Solana make it a desirable platform for future decentralized apps. As a result, it's important to monitor Solana and the best projects that are being undertaken there.

In the past few months, reports from Wormhole says $370 million of liquidity flowing out from the Ethereum ecosystem in the past month is moving into Solana and Sui where 90% flows into the Solana ecosystem which may be as a result of community incentives.

For more, read this list of 5 shiny new and upcoming Solana projects.