Long Tweet: Solana’s past, present and future

Author: Nansen; Compiler: Yvonne, MarsBit

We are pleased to release our comprehensive deep dive into the Solana ecosystem. The content covers ecosystem catalysts, risks, advantages, on-chain data, and network development.

Solana TVL has almost doubled since the beginning of the year to 30.95 million SOL.

Source: @DefiLlama

This year, Solana’s monthly transactions have been relatively stable, with an increase in voting transactions. (Solana’s transactions include voting and non-voting transactions)

Despite incidents such as network outages and FTX/Alameda crashes in the past, Solana has been mostly up and running this year, demonstrating significant improvements and resiliency.

Solana’s growing TVL, strong DeFi development speed, and stable monthly transaction data highlight Solana’s potential to become a hub of vibrant economic activity.

Solana has introduced solutions such as state compression and isolation fee markets to address outstanding issues in its technology stack.

For example, state compression has reduced the cost of NFT minting on Solana by more than 2,000 times.

Source: @flipsidecrypto

The cost to mint 1 million NFTs on Solana is $253,000 before state compression is enabled, and is only $113 after state compression is enabled. An NFT of similar size would cost $33.6 million to mint on Ethereum and $32.8 million on Polygon.

The liquidity staking space is growing rapidly, with @MarinadeFinance, @LidoFinance, and @jito_sol emerging in the space.

The SOL pledged in Solana’s liquid staking protocol accounts for less than 3% of the total amount, and the growth opportunities are huge.

Source: @flipsidecrypto

Enterprise interest in adoption and payment channels is growing, especially with Visa’s settlement integration of USDC on Solana, the growth of liquid staking on Solana, and partnerships with entities such as Shopify.

Other potential benefits of Solana include growing enterprise adoption, the successful implementation of Firedancer's vision, and the growth of applications that leverage Solana's strengths to serve consumers.

Solana has developed an impressive array of technologies that address key challenges and pioneer potential future directions for infrastructure, applications, and even collaboration with traditional financial stacks.

However, potential challenges such as uncertainty over FTX/Alameda's holdings on SOL could pose short-lived risks to its growth trajectory.

FTX holds a large amount of SOL, with more than 71.8 million SOL locked and held, worth approximately US$1.16 billion. This accounts for 17% of SOL’s circulating supply (as we write) and 13% of its total supply.

(Disclaimer: These data are addresses known to us. FTX may hold many more)

Solana’s journey so far is emblematic of the broader blockchain trajectory—promising, occasionally challenging, but ever-evolving.

Source: Golden Finance