Recently, as the price of SOL tokens has been rising, the tokens of the Layer 1 public chain sector have also seen a general rise. On December 12, Avalanche's AVAX token and Cosmos' ATOM both rose by more than 20% in a day, of which AVAX broke through $40 and its market value rushed into the top 10, while Near's native token NEAR rose by more than 30% in the past 30 days. Fantom token FTM has gone up by 15% in the last 14 days, etc.
Last week, Jito, a liquid staking protocol within the Solana ecosystem, airdropped the wealth effect brought by JTO, completely activating the long-neglected on-chain ecological application. At this time, it was discovered that the Solana ecosystem had made a strong recovery, and a number of new native applications were trying to emerge, including transaction aggregator Jupiter, liquid staking platform Marinade Finance, and more. Today, Solana's on-chain TVL exceeded $1 billion (about $1.044 billion), and the on-chain 24-hour trading volume was $912 million, making it the second largest Layer 1 network after Ethereum ($1.23 billion).
When the Solana ecosystem was in full swing, it was found that although the Layer1 challengers in the same period, such as Near, Fantom, and Avalanche, had recently risen in different ranges in terms of currency prices, the development of the on-chain ecosystem was not satisfactory, and its ecological growth had not only entered a state of stagnation, but also regressed to varying degrees, and had long been left behind by Solana.
In terms of on-chain transaction volume, the 24-hour trading volume of the Avalanche network during the same period was $198 million, which is about 5 times different from Solana, while the transaction volume of the Fantom network was only $12 million, and the Near network was only a few million dollars, and the TVL of the latter two was also 10 times different from Solana.
This also makes users wonder why Near and other Layer1 public chains can't replicate the Solana ecological growth flywheel, and what is the difference in ecological development between these Layer1 networks?
The Solana ecosystem has fully recovered, while the development of the Near and Fantom ecosystems has stagnated, and the TVL has dropped to $10 million
While the Solana ecological application airdrop wealth stories are one after another, new applications are emerging one after another, and TVL and on-chain transaction volume are skyrocketing, the Layer1 networks Near and Fantom on the same track have formed a huge contrast with it, and the TVL of the two has dropped to the level of tens of millions of US dollars, and the daily trading volume has even dropped to less than 10 million US dollars.
As of December 15, Fantom's TVL was $84 million and the on-chain daily trading volume was $14 million, Near's TVL was $59 million and the on-chain intraday trading volume was only $8.4 million, and the Solana on-chain TVL exceeded $1 billion during the same period, with an on-chain daily trading volume of nearly $920 million. The TVL and on-chain daily trading volume of both are more than 10 times different from Solana, and there is no upward trend in the on-chain data movement.
Why is it that both Layer1 networks have encountered major crises and difficulties, and the Solana ecosystem has fully recovered, while Fantom and Near are still stagnant?
As we all know, Solana was hit hard by the collapse of FTX, and its development was once stagnant. FTX and Alameda, as important supporters of Solana's extremely ecosystem, have invested not only in Solana but also in many projects built on top of Solana. In addition, FTX is also the largest holder of SOL, with more than 71.8 million SOLs, accounting for about 13% of the total supply, worth nearly $1.2 billion, while the Solana Foundation also holds millions of dollars worth of FTX shares and FTT tokens.
Therefore, when FTX collapsed, Solana suffered losses in three aspects: first, the scale of the vault assets shrank, second, the ecological application funds were pumped, and a large outflow of liquidity, etc., and third, the SOL held by FTX was handed over to the liquidator, and SOL faced market selling pressure.
The collapse of FTX has put the Solana network in trouble for a year, with the SOL token plummeting to a minimum of about $10, the price of the coin fluctuating around $20 for a long time, and the on-chain TVL falling to about $200 million, and has remained in this range. During this period, the Solana on-chain application not only suffered a large outflow of funds, but also a series of hacking incidents, such as the liquidation of more than 8,000 Phantom wallet assets, and the hacking of the decentralized exchange Mango, which lost up to $116 million.
However, with the recent rise in the price of SOL and the airdrop of the Solana ecological project, Solana seems to have already recovered.
According to ChainCatcher reports, first the oracle project Pyth Network announced the PYTH token economic model, and then announced the airdrop of 600 million PYTH tokens to more than 75,000 wallets, and on December 5, Pyth developer Pyth Data Association completed the operation by Multicoin Capital and Wintermute Strategic financing with participation from Ventures. In November, Wormhole, the official cross-chain bridge in the Solana ecosystem, completed a new round of funding of $225 million at a valuation of $2.5 billion, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi and other institutions. Immediately after that, Jito, a Solana ecological liquidity staking protocol, announced the launch of the governance token JTO, and airdropped 10% of the total amount (about 100 million) tokens to community users, and then JTO was rushed to be launched by Binance, Coinbase and other head exchanges.
The series of actions of continuous airdrops of ecological application tokens and successive financial support by well-known crypto capitals have completely stimulated the enthusiasm and loyalty of community users to the Solana ecosystem. Many users in the crypto community lamented that it is only on Solana that the poor are most likely to become rich, and the Solana ecological application is very generous to users.
Fantom因Multichain倒台深陷泥泞,Near与Wintermute争议风波被质疑管理混乱
Compared with the increasing prosperity of Solana, the on-chain ecology of Layer1 public chains represented by Fantom and Near is much more deserted. Fantom fell into chaos due to the collapse of Multichain, and Near was questioned for the chaos of the management team and untrustworthy due to the dispute over the dishonesty of the USN exchange with Wintermute.
Fantom was arrested by the founder of the cross-chain bridge Multichain in July this year, and the fund loss gap was as high as 200 million US dollars, and the chain ecology also fell into a big collapse, and the stablecoins issued in the ecosystem were greatly unanchored In October, some of the Fantom Foundation's wallets were exposed to an attack, with a loss of $657,000. This series of black swan events caused the TVL on the Fantom chain to shrink to less than $50 million, and the lowest price of FTM fell to $0.17.
Since the Multichain incident hit hard, the ecology of Fantom chain has not improved for a long time. Although on October 25, Fantom announced the launch of an upgraded version of the technology network Fantom Sonic to increase the size and performance of the network. Fantom Sonic will replace the previous mainnet technology stack. On December 4, the Fantom Foundation announced the launch of the Sonic Labs Startup Accelerator Program to incentivize developers to build projects on Fantom Sonic, and provide technical support, marketing guidance, etc., with Andre Cronje, the "Godfather of DeFi", as a mentor.
Some users regard the above series of actions as Fantom's self-help behavior, although the official and foundation organizations have released a series of benefits, but they have not attracted much attention from users.
At present, there are very few native applications left on the Fantom chain, and even the largest DEX platform, SpookySwap, has only $23 million in locked funds, and most of the other applications are millions of dollars. Today, the Fantom network TVL is $84 million, the average daily trading volume on the chain is only a few million dollars, and the FTM token has recovered to around $0.4.
Compared to the black swan experienced by Solana and Fantom, the Near network is much luckier and has not experienced similar unexpected events. However, its on-chain development has been stagnant, including its EVM network Aurora's on-chain TVL has been maintained between $10 million and $30 million, with a 24-hour trading volume of only a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars.
Although Near has not experienced devastating accidents, the team has been criticized for its chaotic management, and the controversy with the outside has never stopped. On November 8, Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy blasted the Near Foundation and Aurora Labs for their perfidy, saying that they did not abide by the contract and refused to fulfill their promise to sell $11.2 million worth of stablecoin USN for FTX property. He also said that in the future, Wintermute is not really friends with the Near Foundation and Aurora Labs.
Wintermute with the Near Foundation and Aurora The Labs controversy is simply that Aurora previously told Wintermute that it could convert any amount of USN back into USDT without providing a source of funds, and under this commitment, Wintermute purchased $11.2 million worth of USN stablecoins from FTX assets, but when Wintermute redeemed USN for USDT, Near and Aurora refused.
Although the Near Foundation later responded that Wintermute may use the USN arbitrage it purchased from FTX to arbitrage, which will bring losses to ecological users, it rejected the request.
However, this incident has made the community question the NEAR Foundation and its stablecoin USN, many users said that the NEAR Foundation is darker than hackers, swallowing tens of millions at once; the stablecoin USN is not officially launched by Near at all, but the 40 million US dollar fund set up by the Near Foundation to support USN against USDT seems to be inseparable from the Near official, which is really chaotic management, and even many users wonder if the Near Foundation has no funds to support the exchange, so this decision was made。
As of December 14, the dispute between Wintermute and the Near Foundation has not yet reached a clear conclusion, and the founder of Wintermute has not stopped complaining against him, and if the Near Foundation continues to do so, he will take legal action.
Although these controversies seem to have nothing to do with the ecological development of the Near chain, users are quite dissatisfied with the untrustworthy and chaotic management behavior of the Near Foundation. Recently, although the NEAR token has been rising with the general rise of the public chain sector, the NEAR ecosystem has always been in a state of stagnation, and almost no new applications have been born.
During the controversy, Near released a series of positive news, announcing that Near Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin has been appointed as the Chief Executive Officer of the Near Foundation, responsible for leading the Near ecosystem into the next phase of building an open network, and that the Near Foundation has partnered with Polygon Labs reached a strategic cooperation to jointly develop the zero-knowledge (ZK) attester zkWASM, and on November 9, the Near Foundation publicly announced the launch of a new project, Near DA Data Availability Layer, aiming to provide efficient data availability services for Ethereum and its L2 network, and enter the field of modular blockchain.
Judging from the current on-chain data reaction, this series of positive actions has not brought any turning point to the development of the Near ecosystem. At present, the Near chain is mainly dominated by inscription hype.
Whether it is the influence of external factors or the internal management of the team itself, in terms of the performance of on-chain operation data, the ecological development of Fantom and Near, which were once on the same front, has been left far behind by Solana and is no longer at the same level of magnitude.
The prosperity of the on-chain ecosystem benefits from an active developer community, why do developers prefer Solana?
In fact, in addition to the continuous innovation of Solana ecological applications in the Layer1 sector, the development of the Layer1 network ecosystem, including Fantom and Near, the old Avalanche and Harmony (One), and the new generation of high-performance representatives Aptos and Sui, is in a state of stagnation, and has always been tepid, with neither hot new projects nor user attention and discussion. Behind this gap is actually the activity of developers, which determines the prosperity of on-chain applications.
According to the data of the Developer website, in October, there were 268 active full-time developers on the Solana chain, with a total of 946 active developers, ranking fifth among many blockchain networks, and the top four were Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, and Bitcoin.
During the same period, the number of active full-time developers on the Avalanche, Near, Aptos, Fantom, and harmony networks was 133, 103, 55, 32, and 22, respectively, and the total number of developers was 472, 441, 174, 119, and 85.
In fact, the collapse of FTX last year did not cause a large-scale exodus of Solana developers, and the number of monthly active developers has always remained above 2,000, and in March this year, the number of monthly active Solana developers reached 2,732, and the number of code submitted also hit a new high.
Developers have always been regarded as the most valuable commodity in the blockchain network, and the blockchain industry is known as "developers win the world". A prerequisite for a widely adopted L1 ecosystem is a strong developer community, and directly related to developer activity is the growth of the ecosystem, which refers to the number of new and unique projects launched on various chains. The general expectation is that the more activity a developer has, the more projects there are, the higher the usage, and without a developer developing a product, there is nothing for users to use. And the activity of developers is also a testament to how well blockchains, native code, and virtual machines are built and developed.
Solana is now one of the leading networks in terms of developer activity, and its developer community vitality has been praised by crypto industry leaders. Shortly after the FTX crash, Ethereum founder V God tweeted that some smart people told him that Solana is a serious and intelligent development community and hopes that it will have a bright future. Subsequently, Chris Burniske, partner of Placeholder VC, replied and explained: The Solana community has a group of hardcore developers and technical geeks, many exciting builders, and compared with Ethereum and Cosmos, Solana on-chain innovation is more independent and other advantages.
So, why do developers prefer Solana? This is probably due to the fact that Solana provides developers with high-quality technology, supporting facilities, and a friendly development environment that other chains can't provide.
In September this year, Rune, the founder of MakeDao, said when exploring the creation of a new application chain based on the Solana codebase, NewChain, that as for why he favored Solana, it was mainly due to Solana's high code quality, resilient ecosystem and thriving developer community. Cosmos also has a large number of high-quality developers, but it is less efficient and more expensive to maintain than Solana.
Solana also knows this and has always put developers at the heart of it. When asked in the latest AMA by Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko, "Who is Solana's target audience, and has anything changed?", he replied, "Yes, Solana is an operating system." My parents should never care what kind of operating system they use, but they should love the applications built on it, so our goal is to make developers as productive as possible. ”
It is reported that Solana's code only needs 2 engineers to run its application, while the dydx application chain needs at least 30 engineers and researchers to function properly.
Solana is committed to creating a friendly development environment for developers with mature technology, continuously increasing the technical side, continuously optimizing and improving the network situation, and striving to minimize the threshold for developers to use. It is reported that programmers can develop a DApp on Solana in just a few minutes, and with the help of some developer platforms, developers can create custom DApp source code with just a few clicks, including smart contracts, web UI, and server-side APIs.
This year, for example, Solana has been working hard to address the hidden dangers of network downtime, and has been online since February 25 after a series of upgrades and improvements. In November, Solana's next-generation node verification client, Firedancer, was announced to be launched, which not only improves the network speed, reliability and diversity of validators, but also has a TPS of 1 million during internal testing, which is enough to meet the needs of high-frequency trading applications, making Solana another blockchain with multiple completely independent validator clients in addition to Ethereum.
Earlier in July, Neon, a Solana EVM-compatible solution, was launched on mainnet, and two days later the Solang compiler was released, enabling developers to write Solana programs in Solidity, and these compatibility can reduce developer development, deployment, and migration costs.
In April this year, for NFT project developers, it also launched the state compression technology for storing data, which greatly reduced the cost of NFT minting, such as minting 1 million NFTs for only $921. This reduces costs while also expanding the scope for innovation, and NFTs can be used for more use cases.
In addition to continuous technical improvement, providing stable network performance and perfect supporting facilities, Solana has also developed with the developer community in collaboration with it, opening up new markets, holding hackathons to provide technical and financial support, etc., in order to reach more developers and expand its reach.
Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, said in an interview in July that in February and March this year, it began to increase investment in the Chinese-speaking region and the Asia-Pacific region, and developed a separate developer-oriented growth strategy for the Indian market. On November 4, the Solana Foundation also released an exclusive ecosystem grant program for Chinese-speaking communities, totaling $1 million, to help the development of the Solana ecosystem in Chinese-speaking communities.
To further engage and motivate developers, Solana regularly hosts a variety of developer events and events. This year, two mega-scale hackathons have been held: the Solana Grizzlython Hackathon in February, with a prize pool of $5 million, which attracted more than 10,000 participants to submit 813 final projects to the judges; In November, the Solana Hyperdrive Hackathon held with a prize pool of $1 million, with more than 7,000 participants submitting 907 final projects to the judges.
The Solana-related hackathon has long been a model for the crypto industry. According to Lily Liu, the Solana Hackathon not only provides rewards, but also provides an opportunity to bring developers together to innovate and compete, which not only helps to innovate, but also helps build a community. The hackathon divides the time into two parts, one half for development and project training, and the other half for community activation and developer collaboration. This helps encourage creative collision among indie developers and provides a rewarding environment for them to explore interesting ideas together, which also fosters wider community interaction and collaboration.
In addition, in terms of financial support, Solana has not stopped. In April of this year, the Solana Foundation introduced Convertible Grants, a new financing method to support projects in the Solana ecosystem. The mechanism for converting grants is that these grants are converted into investments only when the project reaches certain milestones. In May, the Solana Foundation launched a $10 million endowment to explore ways in which the Solana blockchain and artificial intelligence can be combined.
It can be seen that Solana's ecosystem strategy is to first strengthen technology, consolidate infrastructure, form industry reputation through excellent data performance, and successfully attract the first wave of developers, and then hold an online hackathon to discover and reward high-quality projects to attract developers to stay in the ecosystem, forming a positive growth flywheel.
Solana not only supports developers with technology and resources, but also provides an environment for developers to grow and Xi, and the culture of "new Solana developers 1v1 communication with senior developers" has become an unwritten rule in the Solana community. Toly, the founder of Solana, once told me in an interview that it was a very good product development process because developers get a bunch of questions or feedback and can make changes immediately. Because we need to know what developers want, where documentation is missing, and where developers are stuck. The process of communication may change the roadmap and plan of the product to better structure the project.
From this point of view, Solana's ecological strategy is to first strengthen technology, consolidate infrastructure, form industry reputation through excellent data performance, and successfully attract developers, and then hold an online hackathon to discover and reward high-quality projects to attract developers to stay in the ecosystem, so as to form a flywheel of positive growth for developers, ecosystems, and users.
Why can't Layer 1 Network Nearers replicate the Solana Ecosystem Growth Flywheel?
Solana's achievements are inseparable from an attractive technical foundation, and at the same time, the resource support given not only benefits the development of the ecosystem, but also benefits from the application products polished by developers in various fields. So, why can't the Layer1 public chains represented by Near replicate the Solana ecological growth flywheel?
This is mainly due to the fact that many current Layer 1 networks do not even have the most basic supporting facilities, and if developers want to deploy applications, they need to not only pay attention to the development of their own applications, but also need to develop related supporting infrastructure, which undoubtedly increases the development workload. Take users and fund entrances as an example, there is not even a trusted cross-chain bridge for funds on Fantom to support other on-chain fund access; there is no easy wallet in the Near ecosystem, which is very complicated for users who are Xi to EVM wallet interaction.
For the same question, Manta also said in an interview with "Why did you leave the Polkadot ecosystem?" that there is not even a mature cross-chain bridge from Polkadot native chain to EVM on Polkadot Chain, nor does it have a native wallet with a good user experience. My team not only needs to develop ZK-related products, but also needs to develop the underlying infrastructure supporting products provided by Polkadot, such as the team spent 4 months to make a wallet when Polkadot was developed.
Regarding "how to determine which blockchain network is the best solution?", Helius, a provider of Solana development tools, has said that as a developer or project CEO, when choosing which infrastructure to adopt or integrate, the first thing to consider is that the application needs to spend the least necessary time on the maintenance of the blockchain infrastructure, and should spend time iterating on its own product to create the best user experience.
The main dimensions considered by developers are: 1. the activity of users on the chain, 2. the use of on-chain interaction and execution time, such as the chain with a low-cost environment for transaction and game products, and the technical trade-offs and limitations of shorter block times and larger block sizes, etc., 3. the liquidity of funds on the chain, such as whether there is sufficient liquidity support when the token is issued, etc., 4. community activity, such as NFT needs artists, and trading products need traders; 5. Grants and late-stage venture capital support, such as new ecosystems may have more grant-supported projects, mature ecosystems may have more venture fund investment support, etc.;6) Technical complexity and overhead of management;7.Programmability and sovereignty of chain rules;For example, some chains do not support native tokens as gas fees;8.The prosperity of the on-chain ecosystem, and the composability with other ecosystem applications, such as DeFi applications that can be combined to provide income, etc.。
In summary, the main dimensions that developers consider mainly include the performance and technical stability of the chain, the threshold of entry, the cost of operation, and whether resources and financial support can be given.
If we compare the needs of the above-mentioned developers, the vast majority of current Layer1 networks cannot even meet the most basic technical stability and the threshold for developers to enter, and they are still chasing the prosperity of the on-chain ecology repeatedly.
In this regard, crypto user Li explained that for users, everyone does not seem to care whether the technology is decentralized, as long as it is easy to use, cheap, and has a wealth effect on the chain, there will be an ecology. However, for developers, when building an application, the first thing to consider is whether the underlying infrastructure can meet the basic requirements and whether the supporting facilities are sound.
In a sense, the developer is a real estate developer in a certain place, and needs to consider the popularity (users) and surrounding facilities. The more active the developer community, the more mature and perfect the infrastructure of the corresponding network will be, the easier and smoother it will be for developers to build applications, and the more prosperous the ecology will be, and then it will attract more and more developers to build, forming a positive virtuous circle.
Whether it is Solana or Layer 2, the reason why networks such as Polygon and Optimism can attract more and more developers is that they have been making breakthroughs and innovations in technology, and the underlying network infrastructure has a complete set of docking standards and processes, and has its own strategy for the operation of the developer community and the development of the ecosystem, which can make the development of the ecosystem sustainable.