Solana DeFi has been performing exceptionally well, with both the TVL and daily DEX volumes exceeding $4 billion. The Solana DeFi teams are firing on all cylinders, led by quality DeFi 1.0 protocols like Marinade, Phoenix, Jito, MarginFi, Kamino, BlazeStake, Solend, Jupiter, Meteora, Orca, Raydium, Lifinity, Sanctum, and Drift. These teams survived the FTX crash, built through the depths of the bear market, and are now reaping the rewards.
However, the new teams entering the Solana DeFi ecosystem have been somewhat underwhelming, partly due to a lack of new narratives and a smaller number of teams focusing on new Only Possible on Solana (OPOS) mechanisms.
It’s time to focus on new DeFi ideas and encourage more teams to build in the DeFi sector, which drives economic activity in Solana.
Here’s my attempt to showcase the top 10 themes, with relevant ideas in each worth exploring. While we are focusing on Solana, some of these themes can be applied to other high-performance chains as well.
This article will be on an intermediate/advanced level; if you are looking to understand Solana DeFi – I have written a 7k Word report on the “State of Solana DeFi”. In a nutshell, we will discuss:
Solana DeFi at a glance
We need more DeFi-native stablecoins acting as DeFi money, forming liquidity pairs in DEXs and lending/borrowing projects. Primarily, their utility is yield-driven. DeFi stablecoins lack utility as they are not a good medium of exchange (i.e. used for transactions).
Stablecoins, or synthetic dollars, can be widely categorized as follows:
On Solana, two LST-backed stablecoins are emerging: MarginFi’s YBX and Jupiter’s SUSD, along with very early projects like Surge Finance emerging.
The Case for an On-chain Foreign Exchange (FX) Market
The FX market is huge, with over $6 trillion in daily volume. The availability of fiat-backed stablecoins with adequate liquidity could pave the way for on-chain spot FX markets through order books and AMMs. Envision a scenario where a merchant can accept payments in USDX and instantly convert them to YENX, with Jupiter routing the transaction through multiple liquidity venues. Someone will sooner or later build a spot Forex trading platform on Solana.
Solana’s LST scene has now consolidated into three major players — Jito, Solblaze, and Marinade. Sanctum is another interesting player in the LST space, solving for liquidity and building LST-as-a-service. However, the number of LSTs is still way less, and more LSTs are beneficial for network decentralization too. Further, LSTs are a major contributor to DeFi, and increasing their deposits in lending/borrowing markets or LP pools leads to higher chain TVL.
Another strategy for newer LSTs would be to follow newer design mechanisms — for instance, follow the two-token model like Frax Ether ($1 billion+ TVL), where it has two tokens:
1. frxETH – 1:1 pegged to ETH and doesn’t accrue staking yields.
2. sfrxETH – accrues staking yields.
However, it’s still worth exploring as AVS on Solana can be — Clockwork-type Keeper networks Pythnet-style appchains, or any networks like DePIN which is ‘SOL-aligned’ and requires economic security. Further, if the Rollapp/appchain thesis on Solana picks up, the SOL restaking narrative can be huge!
With increasing DeFi activity, MEV is only going to increase, and projects (and LSTs) can leverage this to their fullest.
The amount of SOL in LSTs is still underwhelming (< 5%), compared to Ethereum (>20%) which needs to be solved. Overall, it’s now time to increase the moneyness of SOL and ensure the upside of SOL prices is also captured by the DeFi ecosystem.
While the core money markets (lending & borrowing), such as Solend ($300 million), MarginFi ($800 million, and Kamino ($1.1 billion), are established, it’s now time to innovate on the design mechanisms that make them more efficient. For instance, MarginFi still lacks the eMode (a feature by Aave v3), which increases capital efficiency.
Focus on higher capital efficiency: As the blue-chip lending/borrowing like MarginFi and Kamino, exhaust their points and launch tokens; users will want higher capital efficiency, especially for leveraged yield farming.
Optimizers on Existing Money Markets: Taking MarginFi’s SOL market as an example, there is a considerable spread between lending and borrowing yields — a situation that applies to almost all markets. This is due to the liquidity pool mechanism, where the pools are underutilized, leading to lower yields – [ supply rate = borrow rate * utilization ratio ].
A potential solution could be to build something like the Morpho Optimizer,, where the supplied liquidity is dynamically matched peer-to-peer as borrowers come and go (effectively 100% utilization rate). For matched liquidity, the lender’s yield is the same as the borrower’s rate: matched lenders do not share interests. In cases where the liquidity is not matched, it will tap into the underlying lending pool, such as MarginFi or Kamino. Altitude is also a good reference. Flexlend and JuicerFi are well suited to build this.
How Morpho Optimisers adjusts yields
The DeFi fixed rate market share is below 1%, while the TradFi dominance of fixed rate is ~98%, and this is there for a few reasons:
1. Passive: Peer-to-pool models do not have expiry dates and, hence, require far less maintenance.
2. Lindy Effect: Floating rates have been battle-tested, which leads to the lindy effect like sticky TVL.
As Delphi Report notes, Fixed-rate lending in DeFi remains nonexistent. Yield protocol shut down, and Notional Finance’s v2 shutdown (it started with bang with $1 billion TVL and now dropped to $17 million) shows underwhelming demand. Notional Finance’s v3 launch shifts to variable lending and leveraged vaults. Exactly Finance gathered some momentum and brought fresh ideas, but usage was heavily incentivized by OP incentives and native token emissions. Term Finance is another player to watch. A team solving for all hard problems like easy maintanence of loans, kickstarted by incentives can win a potentially big market here.
Lulo Finance (same team as Flexlend) has been trying to solve this on Solana, but still yet to see any significant traction. While Fixed Rates have their share of problems and “ahead of its time idea”, it’s worth exploring.
An adjacent idea can also be Corporate Debt where on-chain revenue generating companies can start issuing bonds to raise funds. Think of it as revenue-based financing (RBF), but on-chain and fully transparent. This ensures profitable on-chain companies don’t dilute their tokens, while raising funds at the same time.
Interest Rate Derivatives (IRD) are the second-largest market after Forex, with a notional value of $450–600 trillion. Comparing the absolute numbers with TradFi may not be directly relevant; however, the emerging nature of this market in DeFi, particularly on Solana, presents a significant opportunity. This could facilitate the generation of organic yield in addition to the money market (lending/borrowing) yield through asset management contracts.
Taking inspiration from TradFi, some interesting ideas to explore would be:
This would be attractive to a new class of institutional and retail clients looking to gain DeFi exposure without much speculation. In TradFi, the contract is between two financial institutions, while in DeFi, it would be peer-to-pool. One can either pay fixed yields or receive fixed yields. LSTs like JitoSOL or mSOL via Stake Rate Swaps (SRS) are the best assets to target, as they are considered the native “Risk-free Rate” for SOL in DeFi — more on SRS.
Some examples of Solana yields that can be traded: Liquid-staked SOL, Lifinity Revenue, Meteora Pool yields, Kamino_Finance kTokens, and Solend Protocol’s cTokens (yield-bearing deposit receipts).
An early-stage project called Exponent is exploring this direction, starting with trading lending yields at MarginFi and then expanding to other yield derivatives. A [redacted] Solana DEX is also exploring “Pendle for Solana”.
With more RWAs coming on-chain, particularly liquid and yield-bearing ones like T-bills. Logically, all RWAs are permissioned due to KYC and regulatory constraints. However, Ondo’s launch of USDY (a tokenized wrapper for tokenized T-bills) and making it permissionless opens up a whole new design space. Ondo also unveiled an intriguing mechanism for tokenized stocks, which, if implemented well, could usher in another wave of DeFi composability.
The best part is, BlackRock fund is allegedly composable with USDC
Structured products and on-chain derivatives (excluding Perps) were all the rage during the previous bull run. Solana, in particular, experienced a surge of over $500 million in TVL in DeFi Option Vaults (DOVs) through protocols like Ribbon, Katana, and Friktion until the bear market took hold. However, with the bull market returning and the demand for yields increasing, it’s no surprise that these products will make a comeback.
With many billion-dollar DeFi protocols on Solana it’s the perfect time to build infra and tooling for these DeFi protocols, given there is a significant immediate TAM.
Memecoins are culture on financial steroids. Their value comes purely from attention and social consensus, not from a DCF model. We might be in a Memecoin Supercycle with Solana at the forefront.
Further, DeFi apps will also become inherently more social. We are already seeing some early trends:
It’s highly possible that the next front end of DEXs won’t be a Jupiter-type swapping interface, but rather a live streaming platform where creators and audiences bet alongside each other, a social feed with trading integrations, or a group of friends who instantly raise funds for the next network state, among other possibilities.
UI-Layer Composability — Telegrams bots makes UI composable for DEXs. Previously people would learn about information somewhere on the internet (X, Reddit, news, Telegram groups, etc), and then navigate to a separate UI to trade (e.g., Drift, Binance, Coinbase, etc.). Telegram bots bring trading to Telegram, where people are already hanging out, socializing, and exchanging information (eg. Ansem’s group).
Continuous Prediction Markets Powered by Memecoins:
The existing prediction markets like Polymarket are binary and discrete, hence the upsides are very limited. Most people want continuous, unlimited upside. A crypto-native prediction market can be in fact, memecoins (eg. $BIDEN, $TRUMP). One can build a niche platform for trading memecoins (eg. a political platform where you can trade all political memecoins and predict who’s winning). In fact, MetaDAO is an example of vertical and continuous prediction markets, but only for governance.
Memecoin Frontends: The memecoin trading UX is still not the best — one has to discover the memecoins, check all its details at Birdeye or DEXscreener, and then trade at Jupiter, while for many early memecoins wallets don’t even have basic support. One can simply make a birdeye, but specialized for memecoins and much more social, where influencers can also shill and copy trade each other. Pump.fun is another interesting platform, where one can ape-in memecoins very early (till $69k market cap). Another adjacent idea to explore would be a DEX, particularly suited for memecoins (currently, it’s Raydium, but the experience isn’t the best).
Cross-chain aggregators for high-performance chains – With activity increasingly spread across different L1s like Aptos, and Sui – building cross-chain aggregators are a good opportunity with significant first mover advantage. Intents-based DEXs (tending to order books) are also an interesting direction for better quotes for users.
Platforms enable the creation of new products. Amazon is a platform, while a brand on Amazon is a product. The launch of Uniswap v4 hooks marked DeFi’s first platform moment, enabling developers to launch their product on top of these protocols. Not just Uniswap, all blue-chip DeFi protocols, like Jupiter, have begun to build ecosystems atop their protocols.
Project Serum (now Openbook) exemplified ecosystem building as a platform, with over 30+ projects developing on top of it. The platformization of Solana DeFi projects is still in its infancy but is expected to surge in the coming months. It is advantageous for builders to identify such protocols, position themselves strategically, and be early participants in the ecosystem.
Some projects of note include:
Structured products and strategy vaults present clear opportunities for more product development on these platforms. While transitioning to a platform is a long-term endeavor, it greatly benefits value accrual (a reason why Layer 1/Layer 2 solutions are valued significantly higher than apps) and shifts the revenue generation responsibility to applications built on them. This also benefits the token holders of the platform protocol.
Attention is scarce in crypto, and aggregators command it. Whether they are DEX aggregators (like Jupiter/1inch), bridge aggregators (like Jumper/Bungee), or even chain aggregators (like Polygon), they have emerged as the new, attractive narrative.
The principle is straightforward — aggregators control demand and capture user attention. Although they currently don’t accrue much value (most charge no fees), it’s likely that the underlying protocols they abstract will soon offer them fees or profit-sharing to gain priority or remain featured (similar to how brands pay Amazon for advertising).
Interfaces add extra value on top of the on-chain protocols they facilitate transactions for. With additional tools like UniswapX or Jupiter’s DCA tool, interfaces can win customer acquisition battles and capture value.
In fact, Solana boasts one of the strongest aggregators, with Jupiter leading the pack, and others like Flexlend aggregating yields.
Opportunities in aggregation include:
While there may appear to be a blurred line between “Platforms” and “Aggregators,” the distinction is that aggregators are front-ends, whereas platforms are the base upon which products are built. A protocol can serve as both, as is the case with Jupiter.
It’s high time newer protocols on Solana get built. While EVM definitely serves as an inspiration, protocols should focus on core design innovations, participate in research discussions, and build truly OPOS like Sanctum or Phoenix. We will the Solana DeFi getting more divergent from the Ethereum Take inspiration from TradFi, and see what can be built on-chain, leveraging the high capital velocity and speculation.
The infra has finally reached a point where it can withstand a high scale of activity. Many DeFi primitives that previously failed due to being too early are now viable again. It will be exciting to see how this will unfold over the coming years.
Subscribe; you won’t regret :)
Subscribe
Feel free to contact me at Yash Agarwal (@yashhsm on Twitter) for any suggestions or if you have any opinions. If you find this even slightly insightful, please share it — justifies my weeks of effort and gets more eyeballs :)
Special thanks to Sitesh (Superteam), Kash (Superteam), Apoorv (Stella), Akshay (Superteam), Anas (Flash Trade) who reviewed and provided insights at different stages of the draft.
Solana DeFi has been performing exceptionally well, with both the TVL and daily DEX volumes exceeding $4 billion. The Solana DeFi teams are firing on all cylinders, led by quality DeFi 1.0 protocols like Marinade, Phoenix, Jito, MarginFi, Kamino, BlazeStake, Solend, Jupiter, Meteora, Orca, Raydium, Lifinity, Sanctum, and Drift. These teams survived the FTX crash, built through the depths of the bear market, and are now reaping the rewards.
However, the new teams entering the Solana DeFi ecosystem have been somewhat underwhelming, partly due to a lack of new narratives and a smaller number of teams focusing on new Only Possible on Solana (OPOS) mechanisms.
It’s time to focus on new DeFi ideas and encourage more teams to build in the DeFi sector, which drives economic activity in Solana.
Here’s my attempt to showcase the top 10 themes, with relevant ideas in each worth exploring. While we are focusing on Solana, some of these themes can be applied to other high-performance chains as well.
This article will be on an intermediate/advanced level; if you are looking to understand Solana DeFi – I have written a 7k Word report on the “State of Solana DeFi”. In a nutshell, we will discuss:
Solana DeFi at a glance
We need more DeFi-native stablecoins acting as DeFi money, forming liquidity pairs in DEXs and lending/borrowing projects. Primarily, their utility is yield-driven. DeFi stablecoins lack utility as they are not a good medium of exchange (i.e. used for transactions).
Stablecoins, or synthetic dollars, can be widely categorized as follows:
On Solana, two LST-backed stablecoins are emerging: MarginFi’s YBX and Jupiter’s SUSD, along with very early projects like Surge Finance emerging.
The Case for an On-chain Foreign Exchange (FX) Market
The FX market is huge, with over $6 trillion in daily volume. The availability of fiat-backed stablecoins with adequate liquidity could pave the way for on-chain spot FX markets through order books and AMMs. Envision a scenario where a merchant can accept payments in USDX and instantly convert them to YENX, with Jupiter routing the transaction through multiple liquidity venues. Someone will sooner or later build a spot Forex trading platform on Solana.
Solana’s LST scene has now consolidated into three major players — Jito, Solblaze, and Marinade. Sanctum is another interesting player in the LST space, solving for liquidity and building LST-as-a-service. However, the number of LSTs is still way less, and more LSTs are beneficial for network decentralization too. Further, LSTs are a major contributor to DeFi, and increasing their deposits in lending/borrowing markets or LP pools leads to higher chain TVL.
Another strategy for newer LSTs would be to follow newer design mechanisms — for instance, follow the two-token model like Frax Ether ($1 billion+ TVL), where it has two tokens:
1. frxETH – 1:1 pegged to ETH and doesn’t accrue staking yields.
2. sfrxETH – accrues staking yields.
However, it’s still worth exploring as AVS on Solana can be — Clockwork-type Keeper networks Pythnet-style appchains, or any networks like DePIN which is ‘SOL-aligned’ and requires economic security. Further, if the Rollapp/appchain thesis on Solana picks up, the SOL restaking narrative can be huge!
With increasing DeFi activity, MEV is only going to increase, and projects (and LSTs) can leverage this to their fullest.
The amount of SOL in LSTs is still underwhelming (< 5%), compared to Ethereum (>20%) which needs to be solved. Overall, it’s now time to increase the moneyness of SOL and ensure the upside of SOL prices is also captured by the DeFi ecosystem.
While the core money markets (lending & borrowing), such as Solend ($300 million), MarginFi ($800 million, and Kamino ($1.1 billion), are established, it’s now time to innovate on the design mechanisms that make them more efficient. For instance, MarginFi still lacks the eMode (a feature by Aave v3), which increases capital efficiency.
Focus on higher capital efficiency: As the blue-chip lending/borrowing like MarginFi and Kamino, exhaust their points and launch tokens; users will want higher capital efficiency, especially for leveraged yield farming.
Optimizers on Existing Money Markets: Taking MarginFi’s SOL market as an example, there is a considerable spread between lending and borrowing yields — a situation that applies to almost all markets. This is due to the liquidity pool mechanism, where the pools are underutilized, leading to lower yields – [ supply rate = borrow rate * utilization ratio ].
A potential solution could be to build something like the Morpho Optimizer,, where the supplied liquidity is dynamically matched peer-to-peer as borrowers come and go (effectively 100% utilization rate). For matched liquidity, the lender’s yield is the same as the borrower’s rate: matched lenders do not share interests. In cases where the liquidity is not matched, it will tap into the underlying lending pool, such as MarginFi or Kamino. Altitude is also a good reference. Flexlend and JuicerFi are well suited to build this.
How Morpho Optimisers adjusts yields
The DeFi fixed rate market share is below 1%, while the TradFi dominance of fixed rate is ~98%, and this is there for a few reasons:
1. Passive: Peer-to-pool models do not have expiry dates and, hence, require far less maintenance.
2. Lindy Effect: Floating rates have been battle-tested, which leads to the lindy effect like sticky TVL.
As Delphi Report notes, Fixed-rate lending in DeFi remains nonexistent. Yield protocol shut down, and Notional Finance’s v2 shutdown (it started with bang with $1 billion TVL and now dropped to $17 million) shows underwhelming demand. Notional Finance’s v3 launch shifts to variable lending and leveraged vaults. Exactly Finance gathered some momentum and brought fresh ideas, but usage was heavily incentivized by OP incentives and native token emissions. Term Finance is another player to watch. A team solving for all hard problems like easy maintanence of loans, kickstarted by incentives can win a potentially big market here.
Lulo Finance (same team as Flexlend) has been trying to solve this on Solana, but still yet to see any significant traction. While Fixed Rates have their share of problems and “ahead of its time idea”, it’s worth exploring.
An adjacent idea can also be Corporate Debt where on-chain revenue generating companies can start issuing bonds to raise funds. Think of it as revenue-based financing (RBF), but on-chain and fully transparent. This ensures profitable on-chain companies don’t dilute their tokens, while raising funds at the same time.
Interest Rate Derivatives (IRD) are the second-largest market after Forex, with a notional value of $450–600 trillion. Comparing the absolute numbers with TradFi may not be directly relevant; however, the emerging nature of this market in DeFi, particularly on Solana, presents a significant opportunity. This could facilitate the generation of organic yield in addition to the money market (lending/borrowing) yield through asset management contracts.
Taking inspiration from TradFi, some interesting ideas to explore would be:
This would be attractive to a new class of institutional and retail clients looking to gain DeFi exposure without much speculation. In TradFi, the contract is between two financial institutions, while in DeFi, it would be peer-to-pool. One can either pay fixed yields or receive fixed yields. LSTs like JitoSOL or mSOL via Stake Rate Swaps (SRS) are the best assets to target, as they are considered the native “Risk-free Rate” for SOL in DeFi — more on SRS.
Some examples of Solana yields that can be traded: Liquid-staked SOL, Lifinity Revenue, Meteora Pool yields, Kamino_Finance kTokens, and Solend Protocol’s cTokens (yield-bearing deposit receipts).
An early-stage project called Exponent is exploring this direction, starting with trading lending yields at MarginFi and then expanding to other yield derivatives. A [redacted] Solana DEX is also exploring “Pendle for Solana”.
With more RWAs coming on-chain, particularly liquid and yield-bearing ones like T-bills. Logically, all RWAs are permissioned due to KYC and regulatory constraints. However, Ondo’s launch of USDY (a tokenized wrapper for tokenized T-bills) and making it permissionless opens up a whole new design space. Ondo also unveiled an intriguing mechanism for tokenized stocks, which, if implemented well, could usher in another wave of DeFi composability.
The best part is, BlackRock fund is allegedly composable with USDC
Structured products and on-chain derivatives (excluding Perps) were all the rage during the previous bull run. Solana, in particular, experienced a surge of over $500 million in TVL in DeFi Option Vaults (DOVs) through protocols like Ribbon, Katana, and Friktion until the bear market took hold. However, with the bull market returning and the demand for yields increasing, it’s no surprise that these products will make a comeback.
With many billion-dollar DeFi protocols on Solana it’s the perfect time to build infra and tooling for these DeFi protocols, given there is a significant immediate TAM.
Memecoins are culture on financial steroids. Their value comes purely from attention and social consensus, not from a DCF model. We might be in a Memecoin Supercycle with Solana at the forefront.
Further, DeFi apps will also become inherently more social. We are already seeing some early trends:
It’s highly possible that the next front end of DEXs won’t be a Jupiter-type swapping interface, but rather a live streaming platform where creators and audiences bet alongside each other, a social feed with trading integrations, or a group of friends who instantly raise funds for the next network state, among other possibilities.
UI-Layer Composability — Telegrams bots makes UI composable for DEXs. Previously people would learn about information somewhere on the internet (X, Reddit, news, Telegram groups, etc), and then navigate to a separate UI to trade (e.g., Drift, Binance, Coinbase, etc.). Telegram bots bring trading to Telegram, where people are already hanging out, socializing, and exchanging information (eg. Ansem’s group).
Continuous Prediction Markets Powered by Memecoins:
The existing prediction markets like Polymarket are binary and discrete, hence the upsides are very limited. Most people want continuous, unlimited upside. A crypto-native prediction market can be in fact, memecoins (eg. $BIDEN, $TRUMP). One can build a niche platform for trading memecoins (eg. a political platform where you can trade all political memecoins and predict who’s winning). In fact, MetaDAO is an example of vertical and continuous prediction markets, but only for governance.
Memecoin Frontends: The memecoin trading UX is still not the best — one has to discover the memecoins, check all its details at Birdeye or DEXscreener, and then trade at Jupiter, while for many early memecoins wallets don’t even have basic support. One can simply make a birdeye, but specialized for memecoins and much more social, where influencers can also shill and copy trade each other. Pump.fun is another interesting platform, where one can ape-in memecoins very early (till $69k market cap). Another adjacent idea to explore would be a DEX, particularly suited for memecoins (currently, it’s Raydium, but the experience isn’t the best).
Cross-chain aggregators for high-performance chains – With activity increasingly spread across different L1s like Aptos, and Sui – building cross-chain aggregators are a good opportunity with significant first mover advantage. Intents-based DEXs (tending to order books) are also an interesting direction for better quotes for users.
Platforms enable the creation of new products. Amazon is a platform, while a brand on Amazon is a product. The launch of Uniswap v4 hooks marked DeFi’s first platform moment, enabling developers to launch their product on top of these protocols. Not just Uniswap, all blue-chip DeFi protocols, like Jupiter, have begun to build ecosystems atop their protocols.
Project Serum (now Openbook) exemplified ecosystem building as a platform, with over 30+ projects developing on top of it. The platformization of Solana DeFi projects is still in its infancy but is expected to surge in the coming months. It is advantageous for builders to identify such protocols, position themselves strategically, and be early participants in the ecosystem.
Some projects of note include:
Structured products and strategy vaults present clear opportunities for more product development on these platforms. While transitioning to a platform is a long-term endeavor, it greatly benefits value accrual (a reason why Layer 1/Layer 2 solutions are valued significantly higher than apps) and shifts the revenue generation responsibility to applications built on them. This also benefits the token holders of the platform protocol.
Attention is scarce in crypto, and aggregators command it. Whether they are DEX aggregators (like Jupiter/1inch), bridge aggregators (like Jumper/Bungee), or even chain aggregators (like Polygon), they have emerged as the new, attractive narrative.
The principle is straightforward — aggregators control demand and capture user attention. Although they currently don’t accrue much value (most charge no fees), it’s likely that the underlying protocols they abstract will soon offer them fees or profit-sharing to gain priority or remain featured (similar to how brands pay Amazon for advertising).
Interfaces add extra value on top of the on-chain protocols they facilitate transactions for. With additional tools like UniswapX or Jupiter’s DCA tool, interfaces can win customer acquisition battles and capture value.
In fact, Solana boasts one of the strongest aggregators, with Jupiter leading the pack, and others like Flexlend aggregating yields.
Opportunities in aggregation include:
While there may appear to be a blurred line between “Platforms” and “Aggregators,” the distinction is that aggregators are front-ends, whereas platforms are the base upon which products are built. A protocol can serve as both, as is the case with Jupiter.
It’s high time newer protocols on Solana get built. While EVM definitely serves as an inspiration, protocols should focus on core design innovations, participate in research discussions, and build truly OPOS like Sanctum or Phoenix. We will the Solana DeFi getting more divergent from the Ethereum Take inspiration from TradFi, and see what can be built on-chain, leveraging the high capital velocity and speculation.
The infra has finally reached a point where it can withstand a high scale of activity. Many DeFi primitives that previously failed due to being too early are now viable again. It will be exciting to see how this will unfold over the coming years.
Subscribe; you won’t regret :)
Subscribe
Feel free to contact me at Yash Agarwal (@yashhsm on Twitter) for any suggestions or if you have any opinions. If you find this even slightly insightful, please share it — justifies my weeks of effort and gets more eyeballs :)
Special thanks to Sitesh (Superteam), Kash (Superteam), Apoorv (Stella), Akshay (Superteam), Anas (Flash Trade) who reviewed and provided insights at different stages of the draft.