Solana Coin Set: Top 6 promising high & mid market cap Solana project tokens
FTX: All 6 tokens available
Binance: 4/6. 2 tokens about to be listed.
Methodology:
Developing a coin set for Solana based projects is tricky in a few ways. We have seen the amazing ecosystem Solana has attracted over the past two years and many new projects are developed and funded each week. However, Solana’s projects at the moment are very less though very promising and full of potential. The problem, though, is finding tokens that are available in big exchanges as many projects have just started to initiate the listing process or are about to begin talking to these exchanges.
The good news however, is that there are a handful of projects that have an amazing roadmap and are fully functional right now being available in exchanges like Binance, and FTX for Murdex to support. After researching 40+ projects and analysing 15+ projects in detail, I have finally found a perfect balance in 6 tokens that show amazing progress and long term commitment.
The research methodology:
This research is done with a free float supply model to provide a better approximation of the SPL token’s liquidity and market capitalization. I have not considered an equal weightage model here as different projects present different growth and we want to share the weightage according to the token’s scope.
The weightage (scoring) is mainly classified into 4 areas — platform vision, coin strength, product and team & advisory. These 4 areas are further subdivided into a total of 13 functions. The areas and functions are as follows:
Platform vision:
- Roadmap
- Exchanges
Coin strength:
- Total tokens
- Whether deflationary
- % of coins allocated to founding team
- Market Cap
Product:
- Whitepaper
- Open source code
- Product Status
Team & Advisory:
- Centralised / Decentralised / semi-centralised
- Community size
- Team size (if available)
- Bg. of the founding team (were they part of multinational companies before)
Coin-set:
Theme: Top 6 promising high & mid market cap Solana tokens.
Risk Category: Medium
While it is not easy to put a risk level on any of the crypto projects yet, the risk level for this coin set is set to “Medium”. This risk level considerably puts you on a safer side than YOLO’ing on just the “hot” projects right now, some of which don’t seem to have a great future.
By balancing the portfolio to such a level, the investor is guaranteed a safety net. At the same time, since most of the Solana ecosystem tokens are still massively under-valued and under-penetrated, the upside will be very good when these tokens move towards market discovery and mass adoption.
The reason for keeping the maximum allocation to 40% is because of a) the bullishness on SOL token in general. I still feel SOL is undervalued for what it promises. b) The other tokens are just starting out to accumulate large TVL and users as more people come into the SOL ecosystem. I think these tokens will be the top winners in the next 3–5 years. Once these tokens are opened for and listed in more exchanges, they will have an even more positive run. All in time.
Let’s cover each of the tokens mentioned in detail.
SOLANA (SOL)
Area: Layer 1, Infrastructure
Overview:
Solana is a high performance L1 blockchain that has become famous due to its ultra fast transaction speed with smart contract functionality. Having Solana in the coin set is the safest bet as all the sub tokens in the ecosystem will react according to Solana price movements. Also Solana leads the way in terms of infrastructure development.
Notable Benefits:
- Fast
- Decentralised
- Low fees
- Scalable
- Huge ecosystem and community
- 200+ native projects
Pointers:
Well this coin does not need any pointers to be included in the coin set but here are some of my favourite narratives:
- Existence of wormhole and cross-chain compatibility with Ethereum
- Amazing Ecosystem — Huge partnerships with retail investors and also helping other apps that build on top of it.
- Ability to jump trade due to low tx fees incentivises more users to migrate to Solana for DeFi farming.
- Current TPS at 50000 and will only scale higher
Price Action: Never looking back
Tokenomics:
With Solana’s max supply is fixed at $500 mil now and without considering the consistent burning of SOL tokens, from the above graph you can see that the tokenomics has a negative inflation rate
Outcome: Super bullish on SOL and the entire ecosystem.
Now let’s look at the other coins in detail.
Serum (SRM):
Area: DeFi, Infrastructure
Overview:
Notable Benefits:
- Serum supports cross-chain trading
- Faster network
- Deflationary
- Serum utilizes advanced smart contracts to remove all human intervention from the core processes of the system
- Onchain order books
Tokenomics:
A major differentiating factor with SRM tokens is that all presale / seed sale tokens have a long term lock up period. This strongly suggests the team and the early investors of the project believe in long term prospects of the project and a good sign for us investors.
SRM holders have other benefits as well — such as — upto 60% feed reduction. The best part is that the trading fees collected from the Serum Dex will be used in a SRM buyback and burn program.This makes this token deflationary in nature.
Serum offers fully decentralised exchanges with on-chain order books. It also supports cross-chain trading, first of a kind for DeFi platforms, and also boasts ERC-20 tokens.
Roadmap: POSITIVE
Serum roadmap is very detailed and consists of five phases. The first two phases are done and the third phase is live now.
Team: HUGE POSITIVE
The team behind the Serum project is very diverse, consisting founders of FTX, Solana blockchain and Compound protocol. Theta are a mix of founders and startup leaders and also consists of a former economist and financial analysts.
Alameda Research, FTX and Solana blockchain
Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO — FTX
Robert Leshner, CEO — Compound
Gary Wang, Founder — FTX
(and more…)
Outcome: Great potential with new integrations, cross platform approach and a set roadmap and sound governance system.
Price History: Finding starts
Oxygen (OXY):
Area: Infrastructure
TVL: 6,868,336
Oxygen is a DeFi Prime Brokerage Protocol that provides prime brokerage services to regular DeFi users. Prime brokerage is generally limited to huge investors in CeFi and Oxygen wants to change that to enable certain features of prime brokering to regular DeFi users. Oxy also lets users create their own pool and mark which assets they want to lend. The protocol’s other offerings include lending and borrowing services, fund transfers, and token exchanges,.. Etc.
Overview:
Notable Benefits:
- Since Oxygen is built on top of Serum, it can use and power apps that are using Serum’s services and can be built on top of Oxygen.
- By holding the OXY token, users can benefit upto 50% of feed reductions
- Allows borrowing from different portfolio
- On-chain market brokering
The tokenomics looks strong with the team just getting 10% and the lock in period is set to 1 year. After the first year, the total token will gradually unlock over another 5 year period. The community fund allocation at 45% sends a strong signal towards open source and governance model development, which the team has implemented from Day 1.
Why positive on the token?
As more people enter into the Solana ecosystem, more liquidity will be available for the platform.
Oxygen has already integrated with another dapp built on top of Serum, maps.me, which serves 140M+ users, giving them passive income.
Oxygen has a strong community in the making and are accessible to everyone via their social media platforms. The governance also looks strong as more people present ideas and vote as each token held will take one vote as an input for governance projects.
Roadmap: Moderately positive
There is no big roadmap of sorts in the documentation but the CEO did give an interview couple of months ago discussing the future plans. The discussion sounds positive and well-in-line with the platform goals.
“The first phase of Oxygen is a borrow-lending via a pools-based infrastructure. We next plan to create volatility trading agreements and structured product functions, so that developers can create their own structured products for themselves and their clients. Our ultimate vision is to recreate marketplace-esque business units which exist within investment banks and make them accessible to everyone.” — From the interview
OXY market cap dominance looks very positive. The percentage share of OXY trading is increasing as compared to the percentage share of total crypto market cap.
Team: ALL STARS
Alex Grebnev, CFA, Co-Founder Alex has over 16 years of investment banking (Managing Director at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs) and fintech experience.
Viktor Mangazeev, Co-Founder was the CEO and co-founder of myDFS, a daily mobile fantasy sports platform called uTrener and a white-label
Sam Bankman-Fried, Advisor Before founding Alameda and then FTX,
Adrian Ciaffoncini, Advisor, brings over 7 years of experience in financial services, having worked at one of Australia’s largest banks and more recently for Morningstar’s asset management business
Outcome: Great potential with new integrations, cross platform approach and a set roadmap and sound governance system.
Bonafida (FIDA):
Area: DeFi
Bonfida is the full product suite that aims to bridge the gap between Serum, Solana, and the user. Bonfida is the flagship Serum GUI and brings Solana data analytics to the field.
One lesson from the DeFi space in the ethereum ecosystem in early 2017 is that for DEX to compete with big CEXs with big fundings, the DEX should have an intuitive UI & UX. Also important is a good order book that can compete with competition. Bonafida offers that and more with GUI and API requests. It provides data directly from Serum.
Overview:
Notable Benefits: FIDA staking and governance has many usability benefits apart from just lesser fees and voting rights
- Exclusive API endpoints — Huge upside as other DeFi apps and other apps build on Serum could benefit from holding FIDA
- Solible listings and market making — NFT. This in particular is an exciting project.
- Full fledged analytics dashboard
- Build bots on top of Serum where people can pledge their collateral to other strategies.
Ecosystem:
Bonafida provides a suite of products that other DEXs and apps can use. Many of these products are part of any DeFi product development lifecycle. As more new markets come in, Bonafida makes it easy for others to build their products. Bots, Buy & Burn protocol and token vesting especially provides a great open market for new projects. Due to this and the benefits of holding FIDA helps the token a sound investment for long term holding.
Tokenomics:
Another project in token that introduces locked liquidity options to contributors and employees. The seed sales are also locked at 9%. While the limit I feel safe for allocation to the founding team is 20%. FIDA locks a 10% lock-in period. That’s a plus with respect to tokenomics.
Locked Seed sales: 9% (1–4 year locked)
Liquidity: 2% (unlocked)
IEO: 0.6% (unlocked)
Team: 10% of FIDA (1–4 year locked)
Price Action: Sound project finding its feet
Solible : NFT marketplace
Solible is a NFT exchange built on top of Bonafida. This platform acts as a bridge for connecting NFTs with other blockchain. The long term plan is to develop an e-commerce store where people purchasing these NFTs can redeem these (NFTs) in real life. This will encourage more users to use this platform and try out NFT. With the added benefits of using other products in the platform, people will tend to stick to the platform.
Investors: Positive
- Alameda Research
- CMS Holdings
- Divergence Ventures
- CMT Digital and more
- David Ratiney, CEO — Founder
Outcome: With the focus on providing an intuitive UI/UX and giving additional benefits for staking and holding FIDA tokens, I see a long term potential in making use of the amazing ecosystem and product line up Bonafida has. This is a good product specific investment.
The final two token sets are promising due to the product offerings or governance model or other factors explained. But since these projects are not as advanced as I would like to be, allocating a smaller % for these.
Mango Markets (MNGO):
Area: DeFi
Exchanges: FTX
Overview:
TVL (as of 14-No-2021): 231.1mn
Mango Markets is a decentralized cross-margin trading platform where users can use up to 5x leverage with lightning-fast network speed and near-zero transaction costs.
Pointers:
- Governance centric app
- Onchain voting mechanism
- Mango DAO — but with USDC governance fund
- More lending markets
- Low fees
Tokenomics:
DAO: 90%
Creators: 5% (HUGE +)
Insurance Fund sale: 5%
Price Movement: Positive leg up as more features got unlocked.
Outcome: Good token to add in portfolio due to its strong governance system and increasing TVL value over the last few months
Star Atlas (ATLAS):
Area: Gaming
Exchanges: FTX
Overview:
Pointers:
- Solana’s first huge multi-player game gaining traction.
- Strong game economies, differentiating itself from competition
With these projects gaining more traction over the last months and with the DAOs initiating coin listing in major exchanges, Murdex could make use of FTX platform to create a coin set and provide investment opportunities to its users.
Tokens:
- ATLAS:
Items purchased using ATLAS come in the form of an NFT. thus giving users real-world value in the form of NFT economics.
2. POLIS
This is the in-game governance token. Outside game this token is a governance token, Inside game this token has its own uses in terms of area control /region control,..etc.
Team:
Outcome:
ATLAS is a good short term addition to the coinset portfolio. The game is recently launched and has a very good roadmap and user base. The tokenomics and the governance concept stands out compared to competition from multi-players games on any other blockchain. Continue to watch the trend over a year and can be changed from the coinset if needed.
Close seconds / Closing thoughts: AUDIUS (lack of exchange support, could allocate small % align with ATLAS), Orca (great team and roadmap, I rate this more than mango markets n=but not available yet on FTX).
