With a deep and wast ecosystem of apps, Solana is the perfect project to dwell into and go down the rabbit hole of opportunities. But just what is this promising token?
It is a layer 1 protocol, built on proof of history, where the developers added timestamps to the already great proof of stake, allowing a lot less lag between nodes.
It has a very fast transaction speed (0.4 seconds block time vs. Ethereum’s 10 seconds or Bitcoin’s 10 minutes) but very low transaction cost at around ~0.00025$, meaning it is very beginner friendly and won’t cost a pretty penny to get into.
It is posing as one of the greatest solutions to the high Ethereum gas fees, so often being named ’’Ethereum killer.’’ Recently it trumped Cardano to become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap and it still has a lot of room to grow.
The uses for applications built on Solana range from DeFi, Web3 to games and NFTs with more than 400 projects built right now, with a few standing on top with their case uses:
Wallets
If you decide to dive deep into the solanaverse, you will need a trusted wallet to keep your SOLs. Some of our favorite Solana-based digital wallets:
Sollet, Phantom, and Solflare are the most frequently used wallets on the Solana network. You wouldn’t go wrong with picking either one out of these three, but Phantom stands out the most because of it’s ease of use, as it has one of the best UX designs on the market.
You can connect it to most of the browsers and turn them into a Web3 enabled crypto wallet which can stake SOLs, swap tokens, exchange NFTs and it also has ledger support.
DeFI
The top two players in the SOL DeFi playfield are Raydium and Serum. Raydium is an AMM (Automated Market Maker), while Serum is DEX (Decentralised Exchange). Raydium is used for swapping, farming, and staking.
It is connected to Serum’s order book which provides it enough liquidity to allow retail traders to trade freely on this exchange.
Other great gems include Mango Markets that allows you to do leverage trading with 5x leverage and Solend which is a decentralized, algorithmic protocol that allows users to lend and borrow on Solana. You can earn interest on deposits and also borrow assets.
Tooling
Solscan is a pretty powerful tool that lets you view your and others’ transaction history. It can show you timestamp, block hash, block number, reward, and the address number that lead this transaction.
To add to this, SolanaBeach is an even better tool for exploring the whole ecosystem by adding better UX design, ability to see validators, and activity on Serum.
Stablecoins
The most prominent stable coins for representing the dollar value on Solana are Tether and USD coin (USDT, USDC). You can exchange them directly on the before mentioned exchanges without having to change to BTC or other coins first, losing more money in transaction fees than you should.
NFT
Gaining crazy popularity in the past few months, you probably heard about NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and how they transformed digital art for the better.
People keep getting crazy returns, artists and collectors are thriving but like in most things in life there are problems. Most NFTs are minted using Ethereum, which on paper sounds good but with delayed Ethereum 2.0 updated the gas fees are getting ridiculously high.
On top of that, the transaction speeds aren’t so good either. This is where Solana comes in clutch. It can solve all of the problems mentioned and then some!
Low cost, high speed, and low amount of competition are a few reasons why people keep switching to Solana NFT Marketplace. You can also do so by using projects like: digital eyes, solanart.io, magic eden, and solsea.io.
Gaming
Video games have also been blessed with the opportunity to leverage blockchain technology to their advantage, enabling you to earn a nice amount of money while playing games.
They do so by developing a token-based economy inside the game, which you can use to buy and sell items with other players, or better yet – Mint and exchange NFTs.
AxieInfinty had great success in this field, with initial investors gaining 121738.2% since November last year. If we managed to convince you enough to take a look at some crypto games, we recommend this great Solana based project:
Star Atlas – You get different rarity NFTs the more time you spend in their metaverse – But if you indulge in a space war with some other player you will lose all of those NFTs, making this game a tad bit more risky and exciting.
Dating
Apart from earning massive profits, you can also meet the love of your life using Solana. Meet SolDate, soon to be released project which is the first-ever decentralized, community-owned dating service.
There aren’t any membership fees and you can edit your profile, see the analytics of that said profile, as well as hide it when necessary. You can choose any niche or interest that you desire and they will find your desired date.
The problems it solves include increased security of user data, being that you only need to input your name, birth date, and a profile picture. On top of that, all of the data is stored on the decentralized storage system, so it’s much less likely to be leaked or sold.
Decentralized Social Media
Social media has a huge problem with centralization, meaning that one entity can decide what they allow to be posted on their platform, killing all forms of free speech.
A small portion of private companies control the public discourse, earning massive profits off of content they don’t even create themselves.
Meanwhile, the creators who created all of that are being underpaid and under-engaged, because of the old and broken ads-driven system – Making the companies that own these social media even more rigorous about controlling the content that is posted.
That’s where, once again, blockchain comes in handy, allowing developers to make a decentralized system where you can post whatever you please, without the need to rely on ads to get monetized, as you can do so using tokenomics and minting your posts as NFTs.
A Solana-based solution to this is yet to be released, but it has been announced and it is called – Solcial.
The company promises to put a heavy focus on monetization opportunities for the content creations, while leveraging the benefits of Solana to make the process of posting, commenting, and overall user experience very fast and very cheap. You can expect this project to be released to the public in December this year.
