Solana Summer: DeFi Projects On Solana Are Raising Millions of Dollars
Solana, which has made an incredible 122% soar in the past month, is starting to to slow down. As SOL has secured its place in the top 10 by market cap, investors are seemingly starting to turn their attention to something else: Solana’s decentralized finance protocols.
In the past week, investment in some Solana-based DeFi protocols overflood the blockchain, leading Solana to crash for 17 hours on Tuesday after bots rushed to invest in a token sale for Grape Protocol.
So what exactly arethese new projects, how much have they raised, and who’s behind the funding of them?
Here are some of the biggest protocols that are leading the ‘Solana Summer’, and some that are still on the way.
Big IDOs
Grape Protocol
Grape Protocol, the leading cause of the outage, which despite all the upset managed to raise only $600,000 during its public raise on Raydium’s “Acceleraytor”.
Grape Network connects to platforms such as Discord, Telegram and (soon) Twitter to help decentralized communities coordinate over Solana and reward their members with crypto – powered by the protocol’s token, GRAPE.
Parrot Protocol
Parrot Protocol is another Solana based protocol. It raised $69 million in an Initial DEX Offering from investors including Sino Global Capital, Alameda Research, and QTUM VC. Parrot is a non-custodial lending platform and decentralized exchange, similar to the Maker protocol on Ethereum.
Parrot is partly backed by algorithmic stablecoin, PAI. In its IDO, Parrot sold a governance token called PRT, which will allow investors to vote on how the protocol is run and farm for yields on Solana without taking money out of yield farms on other Layer 1 blockchains.
Parrot’s IDO was affected by Solana’s outage, but all was wrapped up by September 16. In a “Letter from the Parrot” the team said it will commence work on PRT staking, NFTs and adjustable interest rates.
Upcoming Projects
There are number of projects set to launch in the coming days/weeks on Solana. For example launchpads such as Solanium, Boca Chica, and Solstarter. The sale for whitelisted users for MatrixETF, a decentralized ETF platform, also just began on Solanium.
Larix lending protocol launched on Solana on September 16. From September 15 through September 17, the total value locked in Larix shot from $1.7 million to a whopping $119 million. Some of the investors incude, Solana, Huobi Global and Polygon.
Flippies, a sold-out NFT penguin collection, also launched on Solanium and is set to be distributed on September 21.
Contrastive, a generative AI art series on the Solana blockchain is planned to launch September 20.
As Solana continues to grow at a massive speed, the network’s ability to sustain all these diverse projects will be an indicator to determine their success.
