Author: Pomelo, ChainCatcher

"More than 6000 tickets were sold out, with representatives from over 114 countries and regions participating, and 70+ Solana-related products shared the latest developments and actions, covering areas such as DeFi, DePIN, and gaming." This is the on-site summary of the Breakpoint event by the Solana official.

At the conference, traditional financial institutions such as Franklin Templeton, the French bank subsidiary Forge, and Citibank announced their partnerships with Solana. The trend of SOL token during the conference was also remarkably strong, with daily gains exceeding 10%.

The large number of attendees and projects at the Breakpoint conference has attracted industry attention, making it the most discussed topic at the Token2049 conference, and was once considered the most eye-catching summit event in the crypto world this year.

Following the Breakpoint conference, a large amount of funds began to flow into the Solana ecosystem in search of new opportunities. According to the latest cross-chain data from SolanaFloor on September 23, over $50 million has been transferred from various blockchain networks to the Solana network in the past 7 days. Among them, the transfer amount from Ethereum reached as high as $34 million, accounting for nearly 70% of the total cross-chain amount.

However, for ordinary users, the focus is on what opportunities are available to participate in the Solana ecosystem after the Breakpoint conference and how to capture more Alpha.

After the successive issuance and airdrops of native projects in the ecosystem such as Pyth, Jupiter, Wormhole, and Drift, the impression of the Solana ecosystem on users has mainly been focused on meme coin speculation. However, in this Breakpoint conference, over 70 Solana-related projects participated and announced the latest developments of their products, such as Eclipse, which will launch its mainnet at the end of October, the perpetual partnership agreement Flash Trade, which will launch the token FLASH later this year, and the NFT platform Magic Eden's ME token will be launched on Solana, and so on.

New Changes in Solana: Payment Track, Blink, and FireDancer

Since the beginning of 2024, the Solana ecosystem has been leading one wave after another, attracting the attention of the crypto market. First, at the beginning of the year, projects like Helium Mobile brought the DePIN concept to the forefront and made it an independent track. At the same time, the wealth effect brought by the Solana mobile Saga airdrop token continued. Then, with the AI wave, decentralized GPU projects like io.net emerged one after another. In March, the emergence of the meme coin BOME attracted a large number of users and funds to Solana in search of the next meme coin fortune, igniting the meme coin speculation frenzy on its chain. Of particular note is the birth of the meme coin issuance platform Pump.fun, which also drove the development of the DeFi ecosystem on the Solana chain.

In addition to the occasional surprises in the ecosystem, the Solana network has been continuously introducing new features and exploring new opportunities. However, the optimization of the underlying infrastructure is not easily perceived by users compared to the development of ecosystem applications.

At the end of January this year, the token extension feature introduced by Solana provided the possibility for traditional finance to go on-chain and expanded new opportunities for the development of the payment track.

The token extension feature of Solana allows additional functionalities to be added to tokens, supporting developers to integrate functions such as private transfers, custom transfer logic, and transaction fees into the assets they issue. This provides a comprehensive on-chain token service solution for developers, enterprises, and traditional financial institutions, aiming to help enterprises provide more efficient, secure, and compliant services on the Solana network.

Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin, mentioned in his speech at Token2049 that the token extension feature of Solana provides many features for payment companies or major asset issuers globally, such as built-in revenue functions, confidential transfer functions (hiding the sender and receiver), asset issuance and revocation functions, which are developed based on the direct needs of payment companies and Wall Street. This can enable regulated traditional financial companies to achieve large-scale on-chain deployment. The stablecoin PYUSD deployed by Paypal on Solana uses the token extension feature to provide users with "confidential transfer" functionality.

Multicoin expects the token extension feature to become one of Solana's iconic features in the next 3 to 4 years, which will set Solana apart from many other blockchain projects.

Cryptocurrency stablecoin developers Paxos and financial company GMO have respectively built their stablecoins USDP and regulated Japanese yen stablecoin GYEN through Solana's token extension feature.

The introduction of the token extension feature has accelerated Solana's development in cryptocurrency payment infrastructure and is an important technical support for the implementation of the Payfi concept.

In addition, at the Breakpoint conference, Solana focused on new features such as Blink, the client-side Firedancer, and the introduction of ZK Compression technology, all of which are important iterative features in the Solana 2.0 phase released in the middle of the year.

Among them, the Blinks plugin feature mainly refers to the ability to directly convert Dapp and on-chain operations such as voting and trading interaction behaviors into shareable website links, allowing these links to be inserted into any website or page for direct transactions. For example, on platform X, users can include relevant links generated by Blink in their tweets, allowing users to directly purchase tokens, make payments, donations, or vote, making on-chain transactions on Solana simpler and reducing the entry barriers for users to enter the cryptocurrency world, and reaching more users, allowing them to participate in cryptocurrency transactions and applications in their daily environment.

In July this year, the Solana Foundation also announced a $400,000 grant program for developers of open-source tools for Blinks to attract developers to build related tool facilities and increase activity in the ecosystem.

ZK Compression technology allows developers to use Solana's ledger space more economically, effectively reducing the demand for on-chain storage space, thereby reducing costs and improving overall scalability. It is reported that this technology can save Solana developers about 1000 times in costs. By adopting ZK Compression technology, the Solana ecosystem can more effectively process large amounts of data, helping developers and users to build applications on a large scale.

Firedancer is a new generation high-performance validator client developed by market maker Jump Trading, which can eliminate single point of failure and enhance the overall robustness of the network.

Multicoin stated that the Jump team has applied all the knowledge and experience accumulated in building high-performance trading systems to this client, providing Solana network with strong scalability and speed, and will accelerate the realization of Solana's vision to build a decentralized Nasdaq.

From this perspective, the token extension feature allows traditional finance to have the opportunity to go on-chain, and the cooperation with Paypal enables the real implementation of cryptocurrency payments; Blinks is a set of development tools that make it easier for developers to integrate applications, making cryptocurrency applications more user-friendly and shareable like Web2 applications; and Firedancer improves the transaction experience by enhancing network performance; ZK Compression mainly aims to reduce the development costs for developers.

Overall, this series of actions aims to lower the development threshold for developers and the usage threshold for users, paving the way for Solana to move towards large-scale applications.

How can users participate in the Solana ecosystem?

In addition to improvements in network performance and infrastructure, Solana is actively promoting ecosystem layout and project innovation. First, Solana is developing native Web3 products such as DeFi and games on-chain, while also making strong layouts in areas such as DePIN and Payfi.

Taking the Solana Mobile phone series as an example, this not only provides a direct distribution channel for DePIN projects, helping to solve the initial user acquisition problem, but also will become the payment center for Payfi and an important entry point for entering DeFi.

So how can one participate in the opportunities offered by Solana and capture more Alpha?

For users, in addition to paying attention to the optimization of the Solana network itself and the positive news about the SOL token, it is also necessary to pay attention to the ecosystem projects and their dynamics.

At the Breakpoint conference, 75 Solana ecosystem products released recent updates, covering areas such as payments, DeFi, DePIN, LST, RWA, AI, and more.

In the field of DeFi, the largest decentralized stablecoin protocol on Ethereum, SKY (formerly known as MakerDAO), announced at Token2049 that it will launch an upgraded stablecoin USDS and governance token SKY on Solana. It will also allocate 2 million SKY liquidity incentives to Solana DeFi protocols integrating USDS and SKY on a weekly basis, which means that participating DeFi users may also receive SKY token rewards.

In Solana's native DeFi projects, the DEX aggregator Jupiter not only acquired the blockchain explorer Solana FM but also acquired the top-ranked DEX aggregator Coinhall on Cosmos. It also added new features for meme coin issuance called Ape Mint. The perpetual partnership agreement Flash Trade will launch the token FLASH later this year. The LST protocol Sanctum introduced a payment financial card. The lending protocol Kamino plans to release the V2 version and will introduce spot leverage new features in the coming weeks. The perpetual contract platform Zeta Markets launched the decentralized exchange ZEX, and the DEX aggregator Ranger will introduce perpetual contract functionality, and so on.

In the stablecoin field, the stablecoin infrastructure Perena launched a trading platform Numeraire specifically for stablecoins. The LST protocol Solayer announced a collaboration with Open Eden to launch SUSD, a yield stablecoin generated by RWA asset collateral. The stablecoin PHPC launched by the Philippine cryptocurrency exchange Coins.ph will be launched on the Solana network next quarter, and so on.

In the NFT and gaming tracks, the NFT platform Magic Eden's ME token will be launched on Solana. The content creation platform DRiP will release an open test version on iOS and Android. The survival simulation game Colony will release a closed alpha version in early 2025. The NFT financial protocol Tensor sets the market fee at 50% for developers and distributes the other 50% to its foundation treasury. The open-world game platform FrodoBots launched the treasure hunting game Earth Rovers, and so on.

In terms of the quality of participating projects, many of them are new projects with moderate visibility in this Breakpoint event, so users need to carefully review various aspects when choosing these projects.

In addition, according to the cryptocurrency data platform Rootdata, as of September, 8 projects in the Solana ecosystem have publicly announced fundraising, with a total fundraising amount exceeding $66 million.

Among them, the developer platform Helius and the derivatives trading platform Drift each completed fundraising amounts of over $20 million. The game MagicBlock and the on-chain mining project Ore each raised $3 million. The smart device manufacturer Cudis completed a $5 million fundraising, the creator platform DRiP completed an $8 million seed round fundraising, the revenue optimization protocol Carrot completed a $600,000 fundraising, and the edge computing open layer Gradient Network completed a new round of fundraising.

For developers, they can participate in the Solana Labs' incubator, Solana Incubator. The relevant person in charge stated that the Solana Incubator is currently looking for 4 to 6 teams to join its incubation program, including existing Solana ecosystem project teams, Web3 teams considering the Solana network, and Web2 teams integrating Web3. The incubator is currently in the second phase of the application period, with the deadline being October 4th. It is reported that it will provide participating teams with support including product development, design and listing planning, fundraising, and venture capital support.

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