The Solana blockchain and its ecosystem is enjoying renewed attention in 2024, having undergone a significant recovery last year in line with the rest of the crypto industry. The project’s native $SOL token has recovered its place in the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap, and there has been a notable reduction in network outages, with none occurring since February 2023.
As a result, many of Solana’s top projects have seen increased adoption over the last year, while newer projects are getting attention from investors and developers alike.
The benefits of building on Solana have long been clear, with its cheap transactions and rapid processing times relative to other blockchains being two of the big attractions. According to the network explorer Solscan, Solana is currently executing more than 100 million transactions per day, with an average of 500,000 daily active wallets using the network.
The numbers suggest Solana is poised for yet more good times in 2024, especially as the wider crypto economy is hopeful that crypto’s next big bull run will come sooner rather than later. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the top projects that are currently making the Solana blockchain rock.
1. Clone
Clone is a groundbreaking protocol designed to facilitate the trading of non-native tokens on the Solana blockchain. It has pioneered the idea of “cloned assets” or clAssets (such as “clARB” or “clGOLD”), which are really just cloned versions of existing digital assets from outside the Solana ecosystem. They’re designed to bring liquid markets of non-native assets to the Solana network, providing more trading opportunities to Solana users.
By trading all of their assets on Clone, users benefit from being able to manage their entire crypto portfolio in one place, on one of the most highly liquid and capital-efficient DeFi platforms.
The vision of Clone is to make it simple for Solana users to trade a much wider range of digital assets without leaving the ecosystem. It’s an important development for Solana, because the network faces big challenges in markets such as spot trading that are reliant on liquidity that comes from risky, bridged asset trading pools. Clone gets around the need for bridged liquidity, because it introduces highly liquid clAssets instead, creating a safer, more seamless and accessible trading environment.
Clone is built around two protocols, namely Clone Liquidity and Clone Markets, which both serve a distinct role. Clone Liquidity introduces traders to the Comet Liquidity System, while Clone Markets is more focused on the trading environment, enabling users to buy and sell clAssets with instantaneous transaction settlement and no counterparty risk. The two protocols integrate to provide deep liquidity for non-native, on-chain assets with low capital requirements, easing accessibility to the wider crypto ecosystem for Solana users.
Clone has made some impressive progress over the last year, with its Devnet launch helping to grow its community to over 1,000 Discord members and 3,500 followers on X. Clone is all set to launch its private mainnet on February 1st, before following up with its token generation event later, in what is sure to be the project’s most pivotal year to date.
2. MixMob
Set in a futuristic, anime world that melds various gameplay genres including player-vs-player card battles and fast-paced races, MixMob is a fantasy game where players are encouraged to join the human resistance and fight back against a deadly AI that has stolen humanity’s culture.
The gameplay is focused on exploration and racing, with players facing off against other humans in MixMob: Racer 1’s Turbo Arenas in order to win crypto rewards and further humanity’s progress in its fight against the AI. As one of the first race-to-earn crypto games, MixMob: Racer 1 integrates DeFi mechanics into almost every aspect of its gameplay. For instance, users don’t just have to race – they can also bet on the outcomes of the races. Alternatively, they can stake $SUD tokens on any Turbo Arena to earn a portion of the revenue that venue generates. With Racer 1, the Turbo Arenas act as liquidity pools, where players can provide liquidity in return for governance rights, access to premium items and additional rewards.
The recent launch of Racer 1 comes in the wake of MixMob’s Flip Web 2 campaign that aims to onboard new gamers into the blockchain gaming space. As part of that campaign, MixMob held a hugely successful MixBots NFT sale, where all 9,000 NFTs were sold out within 10 minutes, raising over $2.25 million in funding for the project.
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— MixMob (@MixMobOrigin) January 26, 2024
With its backing from high-profile Solana communities such as BONK!, Mad Lads and Neo Tokyo and the recent listing of its $MXM governance token on multiple top crypto exchange platforms, don’t be surprised if MixMob soon emerges as one of Solana’s most popular and successful play-to-earn games.
3. Pyth Network
Pyth Network is one of the hottest blockchain data oracles in the industry right now, pulling high-quality and real-time price information for a wide range of digital assets, commodities and fiat currencies. It acts as a bridge between 50+ blockchains and the real world, serving as a translator to facilitate the free exchange of information between them.
Oracles play an important role because the closed nature of blockchain ecosystems means they’re unable to access external data alone. Pyth can publish off-chain data onto almost any blockchain, providing timely and accurate information that allows smart contracts to execute based on events that occur in the real world.
Although it’s a fairly entrant into the oracle arena, having only launched in August 2021, Pyth has become one of the most utilized and trustworthy oracles available, with a massive following and facilitating more than $80 billion in trading volume. Presently, Pyth is used by more than 200 on- and off-chain applications, highlighting the demand for high-fidelity, trusted data in the DeFi industry.
What sets Pyth apart from other oracles is its unique architecture, which is built by leveraging the Solana blockchain and runs the same validator software, although it is independent of the main Solana network. Pyth works by aggregating price feeds from a wide range of data sources, including more than 90 centralized and decentralized exchanges, market makers and traditional financial institutions. Its data feed is updated every 400 milliseconds, before being compiled and distributed to hundreds of smart contracts to ensure they can access the most time-sensitive information.
Whereas most blockchain oracles are based on a “push” model that involves off-chain processes to send transactions to blockchains, Pyth delegates this work to its community. Pyth’s price updates are published to the Pythnet before being streamed off-chain via Solana’s cross-chain messaging protocol, Wormhole.
4. Audius
Billed as the “next-generation Web3 music platform”, Audius has created a novel platform that enables musicians to retain full ownership of their songs without losing tons of revenue to centralized services such as Spotify. Rather than just publish their songs on Spotify, musicians can instead create their own community on Audius, engage freely with their fans, run contests, mint NFTs and monetize their work independently.
Audius is without doubt one of the most successful projects on Solana. It has grown from having just under two million users in 2021 to almost eight million by the end of 2023, thanks in part to the high quality sound service it provides. The platform enables streaming at 320kbps, which is more than enough for crystal clear sound quality, and it charges no fees, meaning unlimited uploads for musicians. In addition, it makes it simple for fans to find exclusive content such as remixes of their favorite tracks.
The big attraction of Audius though is its creator friendliness. Whereas most artists are poorly compensated by platforms such as Spotify, which keep the bulk of the revenues generated by their music, Audius enables them to recoup everything. What’s more, they have flexibility too, as they can offer access to their music through subscriptions, one-off fees or a combination of both. In this way, budding musicians and bands can build a fan-base without needing to sign up with a record label. There’s also an NFT side, which allows musicians to create digital assets and monetize their brand in different ways.
The project was originally built on Ethereum but migrated away from that blockchain in order to scale and grow. Having conducted an extensive investigation, Audius concluded that Solana was the only network capable of supporting its growth.
5. Star Atlas
As one of the crypto industry’s leading play-to-earn games, Star Atlas is a metaverse-based online exploration game that was built using Unreal Engine 5. It showcases some of the most impressive graphics of any blockchain game, with cinematic-quality landscapes of hundreds of unique alien worlds.
Star Atlas is an RPG-style Sci-Fi game that’s set in the year 2620, blending several gameplay genres such as strategy, exploration, mining, flight simulation, battles and more.
The gameplay is focused primarily on exploration and hunting for resources, as players struggle to grow their fleets of starships. The resources take the form of digital assets that can be traded freely, meaning players can earn real-life rewards for their endeavors. There’s a lot of strategy involved too, with players able to generate income from staking, competing with other players to mine resources, build alliances and so on. The native $ATLAS token is the main in-game currency, used to buy items and NFT-based ships and equipment.
Star Atas integrates the the popular Serum DEX platform, so users have options to deposit tokens into liquidity pools and trade them directly within the game.
