Welcome to the Solana Ecosystem
If you’re walking into crypto for the first time, and/or are unfamiliar with Solana ecosystem, then this article should help you.
First you should know, Solana is a great blockchain for learning about Crypto. There are two reasons for that: fast and low cost transactions. When I first got into Crypto around 2018, I was mostly interested in Ethereum because it had a lot of utility to it. Though, I was disappointed trying to learn how things worked when I was being hit with high gas fees just to move $100 around to test out how it worked, and then I had to wait around for 10 minutes for each transaction to clear. These problems don’t exist on Solana.
Here’s an overview shared in a Reddit post on the various blockchains:
You can see that Solana is fast, cheap, and it has room to grow based on the a Market Cap comparison.
A Look at the Ecosystem
There are over 400 apps built on Solana at the time of writing, and because things are rapidly changing in Cryptolandia, understand that this info can be come out-of-date quickly. @Solanians (a great Twitter follow) created this amazing overview of the ecosystem back in June.
Let’s talk about some standouts.
Wallets
Phantom, Sollet and Solflare are most frequently cited and used.
Phantom is regarded as one of the best from a UX perspective. They are funded by a16z.
DeFI
SERUM and RAYDIUM are often cited here. Serum is a DEX (decentralized exchange). Raydium is an AMM (Automated Market Maker).
You can use Raydium to Swap, Farm, and Stake. It is connected with Serum’s order book. Serum is centrally important to DeFI on Solana at this time. Here’s an overview of their ecosystem.
Tooling + Explorer
Solscan — where you can view your transactions and other transaction history.
Solana Beach — explore validators, transactions, blocks, and activity on Serum.
Stablecoin
Tether ($USDT), and USD Coin ($USDC) are two of the most common coins that are used to represent USD.
Gaming/NFT
NFT Marketplaces: digital eyes, solanart.io, magic eden, and solsea.io. People list their NFTs on these platforms for resale (and can do other things).
In NFT land, I’ve attended two separate drops now: Bold Badgers and Aurory. Both of these were completely terrible and botched for technical reasons around scale. This apparently also happened with other NFT drops as well, Sollamas and Degenerate Apes.
In gaming: there is a lot of hype around Star ATLAS and Aurory.
Getting Started
I’m not going to give you a primer on how Crypto works, but I’ll run you through a few scenarios of things you might want to do, and how you can do them in relation to Solana.
Buying, Selling and Trading SOL
To get started, you can go to a centralized exchange like Coinbase. You can use my referral link if you’re a newbie. Both of us get $10 in Bitcoin as soon as you buy $100 of Solana, which you will do because it’s going to the moon and you don’t want to miss the trip!!!
But, you can also get Solana on Binance, Bitfinex, FTX and FTX US (another referral link offered here for the Americans out there).
These sites will allow you to get into the crypto game by exchanging USD for a coin of your choice (like SOL…). You’ll have to connect your bank account to do so.
Each of these exchanges will provide a wallet with an address for you to receive the crypto. From there, you can send it to another address, and do other fun things with it, like…
Buying and Selling an NFT
Buying and Selling an NFT can be done on secondary markets like digital eyes, solanart.io, magic eden, and solsea.io. Generally, this is reseller/buyers’ paradise.
You may end up on these sites because you missed the initial offering of the NFT, or the minting process. Many of the NFT projects at this stage have had a launch/NFT drop where the users connect their wallets and mint the NFT on the spot…
Minting an NFT at a NFT Drop aka Launch
Fundamentally, there are a few steps to score an NFT at a launch:
- Navigate to site where they are being offered
- Connect your wallet (can be allowed before minting is available to users, this just depends on the project and the way they designed their site)
- Press the Mint button (could be a badger’s head, or it could be a button that says “mint” or something else)
Sounds simple, right? But remember that in some of these launches, the project offers 10,000 possible collectibles, and in the Aurory launch, there were > 40,000 people trying to get one. All of these drops have sold out in less than 10 seconds.
Keep in mind that good security hygiene for interacting with NFT projects is to create a separate wallet with the minimum amount of currency you need to participate in the NFT. Only use this wallet for connecting with projects like these, and keep the rest of your crypto in another wallet.
Also, take extreme care to avoid scams like this one.
How to Stake your SOL
Staking is cool; you can earn token-based rewards (7%–8% annually) on your positions by staking them with a validator. There are over 900 validators on Solana at the time of writing this. To learn more about how staking works, I advise reading, at a bare minimum, the Solana developer docs on the topic.
However, briefly: To stake coins, you can move them to a wallet like Phantom. From there, staking is supported within the interface of the wallet, which makes it easy. Here’s a how-to from Phantom on how this is done.
There is at least one gotcha: There is a lockup period for staking and unstaking your tokens (Docs). So, don’t stake all of your SOL if you are trying to also actively trade in the same day or within a short period of time.
Cashing out your SOL
First of all, don’t do it because you’ll never get to the moon with those paperhands.
But in seriousness, you can exchange your crypto back to fiat currency by using using one of the same exchanges you first traded your fiat to crypto for (e.g. Coinbase, Binance, FTX)
I’m not sure how taxes work on this, because, well, I’m not a doctor.
Other Resources
Here are a couple other resources that I found useful.
Valuation and Speculation
“I think Solana is going to go to $3000”, is something you might hear. But how realistic is that? To understand the market caps and conceptualize this, try using The Coin Perspective. You can get comparison outputs like this
Coin Discovery and Research
Coinmarketcap and Coingecko are great places to research and compare different coins. If you want to get snapshots of historical prices, look at movements, and get general descriptions of coins, check out both of these.
About Solana
Developer Docs — from Solana, if you want to go deep, you can hop in here and read more about how certain things work.
Solana.io — some good marketing material there that can be quite informative on some of the core topics. They also post jobs for projects in the ecosystem on there as well, https://jobs.solana.com/.
Closing
In closing, I have to say that I’m pretty bullish on Solana at this time. It is an extremely exciting time for the ecosystem. Just in the month of August, SOL went from $35 USD on August 1 to $130 USD at peak on August 31. They are launching a hackathon August 31-Oct 8. Andreessen Horowitz led a $314 Million investment round in Solana earlier this year.
That said, let me be clear about what I mean when I say I’m bullish. I see traction: investment and growing developer adoption, and I see technology fundamentals: undeniable speed and cost improvements compared to existing blockchains.
It is definitely exciting to learn and play around in this space at the time. Have fun out there, and just remember, this is not investment advice. :)
If you found this article helpful, please consider following our Twitter account, which is for a game built on the Solana Ecosystem. The starting prize pool is 10 SOL ($1500 USD), and we will also be doing NFT giveaways.
