The Solana community has been on a rollercoaster this month.
And I'm not talking about just the price.
This was Solana's biggest month ever in terms of price, growth and media coverage.
But Solana has faced some obstacles, too.
This blockchain network is shaping up to be a serious contender in the layer 1 race.
But just make sure you keep your hands inside the ride at all times
because they're still laying down the tracks.
Let's get it!
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In this video,
we're going to be covering some of the most recent updates from the Solana ecosystem.
Solana has been trading sideways since the network experienced a major outage earlier this month
after an epic rally that seemed like it would never end.
The network was down for over a day after it was overloaded with bot activity,
which caused the excitement about Solana to hit the brakes.
This also seemed to slow down the incredible logic- defying rally that Solana had been on for weeks.
But this is just short-term price action and retail sentiment.
Solana developers have rolled with the punches and have continued to build out the network.
Solana's infrastructure is still very new and still growing into its final form.
But it's happening fast.
This week, the Solana Foundation announced that over 400 new validators from around the world
have recently joined the network,
which brings the current number of validators on the mainnet to over 1,000.
These validators come from over 28 different countries.
But we also learned during the outage last week that the validators plan to use Discord channels
to coordinate when the network runs into problems.
This is actually how they managed to get the network back online.
Data from crypto derivatives show that Solana could have hit a local top,
which makes sense considering that the price of this asset has risen by over 500% since August.
However, just because we saw a local top, it doesn't mean that the bull run is over for Solana.
Most analysts believe that it will start to run again
after a short consolidation phase between $100 and $200.
At some point, we can expect the institutions to start pumping Solana again
because this is their top pick for layer 1 blockchains,
and as we all know,
they call the shots in these markets.
Recent figures from Blockdata
shows that Solana and FTX are among the largest recipients of VC funding.
This funding has kept the price of Solana strong
even during volatility that caused the rest of the market to crash,
but it also helped developers create innovative apps to run on the network.
But Solana isn't just one big loop-the-loop.
It supports a whole ecosystem of exciting projects.
One of these new projects in development on Solana is Solcial,
a decentralized social media application that will be powered by Solana's blockchain.
The platform managed to raise $2.9 million in a funding round led by Alameda Research,
Solana Foundation, Rarestone Capital, GBV, Shift Capital and Noia Capital.
Solcial has a pseudonymous founder that goes by the name of Idris,
which can sometimes make investors suspicious,
but this person must have a decent reputation behind the scenes
if investors are willing to pour this much money into their project.
With the way that things have been going with regulators these days,
we will probably see anonymous teams become more common again,
just like they were in the early days of crypto.
Picking and choosing which anonymous teams to put your trust in can be difficult,
but these firms have done their due diligence,
and it's usually better to swim with the whales when you figure out which way that they're going.
Another social media platform called the Grape Network raised over $1 million from VCs
and another $600,000 through an IDO.
Both of these social media projects are still in the development phases,
so it's hard to say how they will compare,
but it seems that the Grape Network is going to be a DAO
where token holders vote on governance decisions for the platform.
The Grape Network and Solcial will probably have different features and interfaces,
but both platforms will be giving users an opportunity to earn tangible assets
just by spending time on the platform.
It's the users who make billions of dollars for these social media companies in the first place,
and it's time that they finally see their share of the earnings.
Tons of other apps for Solana have been raising millions from investors as well,
including a decentralized exchange called Orca,
which recently raised $18 million in a Series A round.
Orca looks nearly identical to Uniswap and many of the DEXs that users are familiar with
on Ethereum or EVM-compatible chains like BSC.
This DEX is already up and running,
and you can try it out using your Phantom wallet today.
Phantom wallet is a Web3 browser extension that works very similar to MetaMask,
allowing you to trade on decentralized exchanges and mint NFTs on the Solana network.
So many new apps have been launching on Solana that it can be hard to keep up with.
One of the most interesting projects with announcements this week is Mercurial Finance,
which recently launched a stablecoin liquidity pool
for stable assets that have been bridged over from the Ethereum network.
This allows Solana users to trade their Ethereum stablecoins
the same way that they would on an app like Curve.
This was not an easy thing to do
because they needed to ensure that the transactions were synced on both networks
to prevent any double-spending vulnerabilities.
They achieved this by using wrapped assets,
a solution that we have seen on other blockchains as well.
New games have also been announced for Solana.
One game called Aurory recently released gameplay footage from their upcoming release,
which will use Solana's blockchain to create a play-to-earn system
where users can win valuable NFTs through playing the game.
The game looks great and stands out from other blockchain games that we've seen so far.
The marketplace in Aurory runs on Serum,
so you can expect a robust NFT experience right out of the gate.
But the most anticipated game coming to Solana by far is Star Atlas,
a space exploration game that promises to combine the quality of mainstream titles
with the play-to-earn mechanics that blockchain offers.
Star Atlas already has a token associated with it,
ATLAS,
which is trading at about 8¢ with a market cap of over $174 million.
And the game hasn't even been released yet.
This is probably one of the most ambitious blockchain games currently in development
not just for Solana but for the entire industry,
so it will be very interesting to see if it lives up to its promises.
I won't play it,
but I'll make sure to ask Deezy or one of the other nerds around the office and see how they like it.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.