The Solana Blockchain has been a popular option for protocols building on Web3, be it for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), GameFi (P2E) or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) — given the scalability and institutional interest.
As observed in the last week of February, a total of ~165 programs were deployed on-chain. Developer & institutional interests are still growing by the day, so we can expect to see that number to increase perpetually over time.
Project Serum
Built from the same team who developed FTX Exchange, Serum offers the mirrored experience but decentralized. It is a non-custodial, permissionless exchange that supports cross-chain trading and rids the need of Know-Your-Customer. Compared to traditional order-books, Serum’s design is entirely run by smart contracts — allowing anyone full control to interact with the protocol.
The protocol offers a large variety of tokens that do not only cater to those built on Solana, but also other chains like Ethereum. They also have their own token called (SRM), utility centred on governance and discounted trade fees.
Shift from USDT (Tether) to USDC?
While USDT is primarily the first option for trading and payments due to it’s availability spread across Centralized Exchanges, USDC has blown-up as the safer stablecoin given that Centre complies with governmental regulation, and information is more transparent on reserves. The recent news of wallets being blacklisted due to Tether have also raised large concerns on how viable it is to hold the currency if users are still so susceptible to unfair regulatory controls.
For example, let’s take a look at SOL/USDT vs SOL/USDC on Serum:
There is a clear shift and attraction towards the latter. There has also been recent integrations of the decentralized stablecoin UST (TerraUSD) onto the Solana Network, with liquidity on platforms like Saber and Solend. In light of the statistics above, we decided to also look at UST stats on Serum:
While UST is still significantly smaller in terms of volume as compared to the pioneered USDC, we may slowly see a pick up in adoption over time when it gets increasingly convenient to bridge liquidity of the stablecoin across.
Bullish/Bearish Sentiment: SOL?
The market has been on a downturn in Q1 due to macro factors; impending fears of a bear. Taking the metrics provided here, let’s take the average of Buy/Sell orders on Serum over the last week of February.
From the 21st of February to the 28th of February, there has been a total of ~11,223,518 buy orders vs ~10,590,032 sell orders. If we divide that, this week on average there is a comparison of ~1,402,939 buy orders vs 1,323,754 sell orders (irrespective of short-term trading) — we can somewhat assume that the market is still relatively engaged but cautious.
Step Finance
Step Finance is primarily a yield aggregator — users are able to compound and claim rewards easily from a variety of protocols and yield farms on their platform. They also offer the features of a visual portfolio, allowing users to track their complex holdings across projects on Solana.
Here are a few examples of their farms & yield rates as of 01/03:
We matched this against our charts: USDC/STEP and SOL/STEP constantly remained the top volume in trades across the timeline as shown below.
Data Availability is important for stakeholders on decision-making for future improvement or simple analysis. With the entirety of Crypto’s market cap being only at estimated ~2T today, we aim to be the superchargers of statistics and bridge the gaps of data transparency and accessibility when the space continues to grow exponentially.
SolanaFM is the First Queryable Indexer that allows users to access historical data on-chain through dynamic Rest APIs & GraphQL, easily supporting queries beyond 20TB. It provides Indexing-As-A-Service (IaaS), saving protocols time and cost while founders can focus on building their projects. On-chain statistics are also available for public viewing with regard to activity on the Solana Network.
Find out more here: https://solana.fm/statistics.
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