The Top Six Projects on the Solana Blockchain in 2022

Many developers around the world build apps and projects on the Solana blockchain. The Solana (SOL) token is also popular and is ranked in the Top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization as of August 2022. 

The Solana blockchain is popular for two main reasons. First, transactions occurring on the Solana blockchain are significantly cheaper than other smart contract platforms can offer. Secondly, it’s said to be faster. The Solana blockchain can process as much as 60,000 transactions per second, more than what most other smart contract platforms can currently handle.

Despite suffering several outages that prevented validators from processing blocks of transactions over the last two years, Solana continues to stand out amongst Layer 1 blockchains.

Due to the benefits offered by Solana and its ecosystem, the top projects on it offer enthusiasts many ways to get involved with not just cryptocurrency and blockchain, but DeFi, NFTs, and the metaverse as well.

Outside of the challenges related to the centralization of validators and the inability to process transactions during temporary outages, the user experience continues to thrive and the value of Solana is unaffected. 

This Netcoins post will review the top six projects on the Solana blockchain that users are excited about this year.

They include:

  1. Star Atlas
  2. Tulip (formally Solfarm)
  3. Solcial
  4. Swords of Blood
  5. Serum
  6. Orca

 

Solana’s Most Exciting Project: Star Atlas

Gaming is arguably the most exciting use case for crypto and Web3. If you want to know why Star Atlas is gaining in popularity without reading every single detail about it, all you have to do is watch the trailer. It’s pretty eye-popping!

It’s a massive strategy game with a space exploration theme to it. Players get to engage in territorial conquest, political domination, and other challenges.

It’s a vast universe beyond imagination and as a player, you get taken to everything you need in order to engage. You’ll notice the main overview tab features a leaderboard, marketplace and a place to store your inventory (a.k.a. gaming assets).

You can also catch a glimpse of what’s coming soon for the game.

The game boasts a market capitalization of over $16 million Canadian at the time of this writing and a Twitter page with over 315,000 users. Regardless of the crypto niche you’re looking at when reviewing social media engagement and audiences, 315,000 followers on Twitter for a crypto game is a massive number.

The bubbling popularity of Star Atlas is abundantly clear. It’s also supported by amazing partners including crypto gaming juggernauts Animoca Brands and Yield Guild Games.

When you get to the website, click Experience on the bottom left and you can see previews of various chapters of the game and see the visuals and some of the storyline that makes up the experience.

Compound logo and black text on a white background

 

Tulip: One of Solana’s Most Popular Yield Aggregators

With a market cap of over $7.6 million Canadian and a massive Twitter following of over 56,000 followersTulip Protocol is one of the fastest-growing yield aggregators on the Solana blockchain. The highest APY currently offered on the platform is a 350% return.

Remember though that any returns you make when using yield aggregators or yield farming as a strategy are usually paid in one of the tokens tied to the liquidity pool you’re engaging with. This means that your returns are paid in that token. A 350% return on a token is only as valuable as the cost or price of each token at the time you’re holding it.

Nevertheless, Tulip’s Strategy Vault is capable of hosting multiple yield strategies in one. It enables the user to deposit a single token asset and gain exposure to many different strategies, allowing the user to maximize the yield they earn on their assets in a more efficient way.

One of the most important aspects of yield farming or yield aggregation is the ability to enter and exit positions or contribute to liquidity pools through stablecoins or pegged assets.

That’s why Tulip supports USDC and USDT, something important to consider as both stablecoins are generally more reliable stable assets in crypto and offer high levels of liquidity in trading volume on the public market at any given time.

Tulip is clearly blossoming into a leading Solana aggregator.

 

Solana’s “Uncensorable” Social Media Platform: Solcial

The invention of social media brings to the world a 24-hour news cycle that a generation before us didn’t grow up with. It offers unparalleled speed when it comes to accessing up-to-the-minute information alongside a way to engage with the friends, family, businesses, celebrities, and brands that we love.

That said, some of the biggest criticisms of web 2.0 social media platforms are that they use data not only to turn huge profits (profits we should be keeping for ourselves) but also to exercise tremendous power in promoting and censoring user-generated content online. 

That’s why a platform like Solcial is important. It’s an uncensored social media platform that lives on the blockchain. As with any Web 3.0 platform, you can guess that your user-generated content and the data you produce will do what it’s supposed to do when you interact with Solcial; put value into your pocket.

Although it has a lot of potential, keep in mind that as of August, 2022 Solcial’s market sits at less than $3 million Canadian, which makes it a small cap platform.

Since the platform operates on the Solana blockchain, it can scale to hundreds of millions of users seamlessly while keeping everything on-chain and ensuring that every user is rewarded fairly when they bring their followers and content to the platform.

Alameda Research is just one of the notable venture capital firms backing this project and the Twitter account for Solcial features over 21,000 followers.

 

Swords of Blood: Solana’s Evil-Thwarting Adventure Game

Swords of Blood is all about thwarting evil and redeeming the World of Ezura from its brutal downfall. Where Star Atlas captures drama in the form of a space-age adventure, Swords of Blood follows a much darker theme and a more intense storyline in many ways. 

Exploring the game and succeeding at it involves having a thirst for crawling your way through dungeons in this bounty hunting battle game.

The gaming assets for Swords of Blood allow you to tame elements like fire and water as you build skills to learn how to fight off evil. The game enables the use of weapons, artifacts and armour to do so. Keep in mind that like Star Atlas, this game is actually AAA quality. It also features fighting from a third-person perspective and is intended for play on mobile devices.

From a crypto and blockchain standpoint, Swords of Blood uses SWDTNK tokens to allow you to purchase assets and earn a return for playing the game. At the moment, there is limited information regarding any market capitalization or participation, but that’s only because the IDO registration is still live, which means the game is not live yet.

Liquidity portrayed as tree growing from a pile of pennies and cents

 

Serum Gives Solana Users Speed and Convenience to DeFi

Imagine if you could have the speed and convenience of a traditional exchange directly on a DeFi platform. Serum provides you with just that.

The SRM token is the incentive mechanism that drives users to the Serum platform. The token provides you with value because of utility, scarcity, and allowing you to have governance rights over the platform just as any good DeFi offering should.

One of the cool things about Serum is that 91.25% of the tokens are locked in for the long term, showing that project founders are committed to making things work for years to come.

Governance on a solid platform is not just about voting rights and decision-making, it’s about controlling and distributing revenue fairly. SRM holders govern all net revenues on the platform.

If you take a look at the project roadmap, you can see that Serum is already in Phase 3 of its development. This third phase will enable the platform to provide a borrowing and lending marketplace, add more cross-chain bridges, and introduce automated market makers, margin trading, and SPL support to Serum.

The website allows you to access developer resources, review interesting products being built on top of Serum platform, engage in a community forum, and of course, review the whitepaper. 

Serum ranks 125th among all cryptocurrencies in market capitalization as of August, 2022, valued at over $505 million Canadian.

 

Orca: Solana’s DEX for People, Not Programs

Decentralized exchanges are a vital part of DeFi, and Orca is fan favourite of Solana users when it comes to that. Orca allows you to trade, farm, and build on Solana’s most user-friendly concentrated liquidity automated market maker. Say that three times fast.

The value proposition of Orca is threefold:

  • Orca allows you to make the trades between Solana-supported assets the most simplistically relative to any other trading platform within the Solana ecosystem.
  • Orca is committed to giving its users the best user experience in the DeFi and concentrated liquidity space.
  • Orca is also the most liquidity-efficient project on the Solana blockchain.

Orca has a $27.5 million market cap, and over $112 million in total value is locked in. The Orca token has been around for about a year now and offers governance rights to holders as well as the ability to pay fees back to the ecosystem while continuing to earn from yielding and liquidity pool opportunities.

The founder of the Solana blockchain publicly lends his support to Orca right on the website and Solana’s own venture capital firm, along with other respected venture capital firms like Polychain Capital, are backers of the DEX.

Orca just might be a whale among decentralized exchanges.

 

How to Buy Solana in Canada

Now that you’ve had a chance to learn about some of the hottest trending projects on the Solana blockchain in 2022, you can explore the idea of buying SOL tokens at Netcoins.

Wondering how to buy SOL in Canada? Netcoins is a publicly-owned, fully regulated crypto trading platform that offers Solana (SOL). Enjoy 0% funding fees and free cash withdrawals with e-Transfers, and live customer support service seven days a week. 

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