Summer 2021 has been an exciting and active time for the Solana ecosystem ($SOL), as summarized with the release of their “Ecosystem Highlights Volume 7.”
The SOL Train
The Solana blockchain has undergone tremendous development over the last few months. On June 17th, Solana released their Ecosystem Highlights detailing all the development to the Solana blockchain from April 17th to June 17th. The first of the major developments listed was the completion of a 314.15 million dollar private token sale from a variety of investors led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital on June 9th. The proceeds will go to improving Solana Labs and the projects incubated by the foundation.
As stated in their press release, Solana Labs aims to create an incubation platform to help support upcoming projects on the Solana blockchain. The task has high expectations to say the least, with a goal of eventually onboarding over 1 billion new users. This lofty goal was detailed in the corresponding statement from Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana Labs Co-Founder and CEO.
Yakovenko said, “Solana is build-ready today. After seeing explosive growth in global developer uptake, we are convinced that scalability and throughput in blockchain are now a solved problem. This is an inflection point akin to the moment that PC’s became widely accessible in the 1970’s. The next phase is onboarding a billion users. Solana was built from the ground up to accommodate this scale. With this funding, Solana Labs is now positioned to bring in the right partners and capital to build products and tooling to get there.”
More Updates: Raising Capital
In other funding news, Apricot Finance successfully completed their seed round with an $800,000 investment on June 3rd. Apricot Finance is an over collateralized loan protocol built on the Solana network and is aiming to become the sustainable, go-to platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. The platform also announced a partnership with the Solar Eco Fund on June 16th. The Solar Eco Fund is an investment group that focuses on environmentally supportive businesses and companies that directly promote sustainable living.
Another project with an extremely successful seed funding round in the Solana ecosystem is Jet Protocol. Jet Protocol, a deeply liquid borrowing and lending platform, announced on June 10th that they successfully exited seed round funding with 4.8 million dollars. The funding was raised from a diverse combination of venture capital and angel investor funds.
Still More Updates (Hackathon, Twitter, Gaming, NFTs)
Solana Season Hackathon Comes to a Close
On the developer side, The Solana Season Hackathon wrapped up on Monday, June 11th. According to the Solana Twitter account, there were over 13,000 builders, designers, marketers, and operators that submitted an impressive array of projects. Solana is allowing the public to decide the winner of the $5,000 grant via online poll, with the winner to be announced later this month.
Twitter Boom
Solana’s Twitter account has now reached a milestone leading into June, as it reports to have started May with 200,000 followers and ended the month with a dramatic 50% increase to over 300,000.
Solana Games Incoming
On the gaming side, Solana-based Bitspawn announced a significant investment from Nodeseeds, as well as publicly announced plans for the future of the project. Sporting features like “Proof of Respawn” (PoR), Bitspawn seeks to unlock the long tail value of the video game sponsorship market via its tokenized blockchain platform. According to the BitSpawn website, PoR is a unique smart contract algorithm that allows for gamified blockchain rewards to be distributed based on skill-centered algorithms.
NFT Options Open Up Shop
On June 2nd, Metaplex rolled out the protocol for NFTs, storefronts, and auctions on the Solana blockchain. According to a post on Metaplex’s Twitter, “Metaplex is a decentralized protocol paired with an open-source web framework that lets artists, brands and creators launch self-hosted NFT storefronts as easily as building a website – all without writing any code”. Its other features include zero platform fees, sub-$1 average minting cost, and creator splits/ royalties hard-coded.
Closing Thoughts
This overview covered the major updates from the Solana Ecosystem review. There are still plenty of smaller developments taking place on the chain as well. Something important to note is as the Solana ecosystem expands, it does so only with high quality projects. A tremendous amount of solid and substantial growth has occurred in the last month for the blockchain. It should be very exciting to see where the blockchain network goes from here with all of the development taking place.
Source : solana.news
