What Is Solana? A Guide to Solana's Ecosystem

## What Is Tulip Protocol?

[Solfarm](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solfarm/) is the first decentralized yield aggregator on the [Solana](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/solana) blockchain with auto-compounding vault strategies. It is designed to take advantage of Solana’s low-cost, high-efficiency blockchain It allows vault strategies to compound frequently and provides stakers with higher APY while requiring less active management. Although the platform is still in beta and all code is experimental, the farm aims for a streamlined user experience with optimal APYs and “set and forget” strategies. It follows the example of [Uniswap](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/uniswap/) on [Ethereum](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/) and [PancakeSwap](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pancakeswap/) on [BSC](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/binance-coin/) by providing liquidity to Solana-native [DEXes](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/decentralized-exchange-dex) like [Raydium](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/raydium/) and [SABER](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/saber/). Users provide liquidity on Solfarm and earn interest on their investment and Solfarm’s native governance token TULIP, while the exchanges benefit from better liquidity.

Solfarm has already undergone a number of iterations. For instance, the team added double-asset reward pools after launch and enabled leveraged farming. In the future, Solfarm plans to optimize its front end to improve the user experience and work on a V2 version of the farm.


## Who Are the Founders of Solfarm?

Solfarm was founded by a group of anonymous people with experience in the DeFi space. “Momo” and “senx” are listed as co-founders, the former having four years of crypto experience managing blockchain projects “with a keen interest and eye for DeFi products,” the latter having multiple years of operational experience in tier 1 crypto exchanges and an experienced on-chain farmer. Solfarm’s Lead Developer is “therealssj,” who’s been working in the space since 2017. “Post” is the senior developer, a blockchain developer with a background in systems administration and involved in the ecosystem since 2011. “Littlepoggers,” a mining and node-running enthusiast, is the System Admin & Junior Developer. Finally, “barney” is the UI/UX Developer with work experience for two unicorn startups.


## What Makes Solfarm Unique?

One of Solfarm’s key value propositions is leveraged yield farming. Like normal yield farming, leveraged yield farming has a borrower and a lender, who deposit their assets into the lending pool to earn a variable deposit rate with automatically compounding interest. That way, yield farmers can increase their positions and earn even higher annualized yield, although they are still subject to smart contract and liquidation risks. Solfarm liquidates at a 85% loan-to-value ratio. At that point, the position will be forcibly closed and the collateral will be returned after the loan has been settled and the liquidation bounty has been paid. 

Leveraged yield farming also bears a directional risk. A farmer that supplies USDC and borrows RAY to farm in the RAY-USDC liquidity pool is effectively short on RAY. A raising price of the asset will result in RAY being sold from the pool and the borrower is subject to [impermanent loss](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/impermanent-loss). If the position remains unmanaged, this can lead to liquidation.

Solfarm offers low vault fees, with the following structures provided to farmers: 

Raydium Vault Fees



* Controller fee: 0.1%
* Platform Fee: 1.4%
* Vault Fees: 0.0%
* No deposit/withdrawal fees

SABER Vault Fees



* Controller fee: 0.1%
* Platform Fee: 1.4%
* Vault Fees: 0.0%
* No deposit/withdrawal fees


#### Related Pages:

Check out [Solana (SOL)](https://coinmarketcap.com/de/currencies/solana/) — the high-speed blockchain Solfarm is built on.


Check out [Raydium (RAY)](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/raydium/) — the decentralized exchange of the Solana blockchain.

Learn how yield farming works in our [basic guide to yield farming](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-yield-farming).

Get the latest crypto news and latest trading insights with the [CoinMarketCap blog](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/categories/blog).


## How Many Solfarm (TULIP) Coins Are There in Circulation?

TULIP has a total supply of 10 million. Token supply is split in the following ratios:

Team - 20%

Advisors - 2%

Treasury - 12%

Liquidity Provision - 5%

Strategic & Growth 12%

Liquidity Mining/Ecosystem 48%

All team tokens are vested on-chain with a cliff of six months and three-year linear vesting, with advisor tokens subject to similar vesting periods. The treasury bootstrap will be used for future protocol upkeep and possible protocol incentives, such as buy back and burns. Liquidity provision will be reserved for AMM liquidity if necessary and possible Fusion pool rewards.


## How Is the Solfarm Network Secured?

Solfarm is the first yield farm set up on the [Solana](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/solana) blockchain. Solana is well-known for its fast transaction times and minuscule transaction fees, making it one of the most popular blockchains to rival Ethereum.

Solana is a layer one blockchain with a [proof-of-stake](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/proof-of-stake-pos) [consensus mechanism](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/consensus-mechanism) with partial Byzantine Fault Tolerance. It has 200 nodes operating worldwide that can, at their peak, process up to 50,000 transactions per second. Solana performs a set of coordinated optimizations to achieve such impressive performance and processes transactions in a multi-threaded way, which sets it apart from slower blockchains. 


## When Will Solfarm (TULIP) Trading Begin?

Solfarm launched at the end of April 2021, but TULIP was introduced after the public beta finished two weeks later. Farmers were retroactively rewarded based on their participation in the public beta period.


## Where Can You Buy Solfarm (TULIP)?

TULIP is available on [Serum](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/serum-dex/), [Gate.io](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/gate-io/) and [Raydium](https://coinmarketcap.com/de/exchanges/raydium/).


Tulip Protocol

SolFlare

Backpack

Phantom

Solana

dogwifhat

Bonk

Jupiter

Pyth Network

Soldex

Synthetify

CropperFinance

DORK LORD

Catman

MIDAS

Sator

ROD.AI

Solzilla

Sypool

Nigi

ThoreCoin

PAPA Trump

Habibi

Brett

Serum is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and ecosystem that brings unprecedented speed and low transaction costs to decentralized finance (DeFi). (DeFi).

Serum is the only high-performant DEX designed around a fully on-chain central limit order book and matching engine. Ecosystem partners can compose with Serum’s on-chain orderbook to share liquidity and power their trading features for institutional and retail users.

In light of the popularity of DeFi and the growth of DEXes on Ethereum, users and developers are limited by high gas costs and slow transactions. Serum aims to resolve these traditional problems of DeFi, as well as issues of centralization, low capital efficiency, and liquidity segmentation.

The SRM utility and governance token enables users to receive discounts on protocol fees and voting rights; 100% of exchange fees flow back to SRM via buy-and-burn, staking rewards, and ecosystem grants.

Serum

Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) and liquidity provider built on the Solana blockchain for the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX). Unlike any other AMMs, Raydium provides on-chain liquidity to a central limit orderbook meaning that funds deposited into Raydium are converted into limit orders which sit on Serum’s orderbooks. This gives Raydium LPs access to all of Serum’s order flow as well as their existing liquidity.
RAY is the native utility token used for:

Staking to earn protocol fees

Staking to receive IDO allocations

Governance votes on protocol decisions

Raydium

Bonfida

Aurory is a next-generation studio building a universe of interoperable web3 games. Two original IP’s were born from this universe, which are actively shaping the future of the Aurory player experience.

The first of these two IP’s are Aurorians. A collection of 10,000 anime style NFT characters that double as both a PFP, as well as a playable avatar with various in-game perks.

The second are Nefties. These magical creatures have been designed as non-fungible tokens NFTs with a unique set of stats that influence their performance in-game. They serve as companions on each player’s journey, and can be hatched, traded, collected, and used in battles.

Aurory currently hosts two playable games (both in alpha) which continue to evolve in a live-ops development format:

Seekers of Tokane: A JRPG, where players embark on a dangerous rogue-like adventure through the world of Tokane, collecting and battling fierce Nefties in epic turn-based combat.

Aurory Tactics: A PvP timeline-based battling game where players must learn how to best use their Neftie creature's abilities, competing against opponents to rise to the top of the leaderboard for rewards and glory.

The project proudly boasts one of the most experienced executive and development suites in blockchain gaming, with dozens of talents from established gaming studios, such as Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Rovio, Warner Bros, and more.

Aurory

QuickSwap [Old]

FRAKT Token

Splinterlands is a digital, collectible card game based on blockchain technology and inspired by games like Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone, where players build a collection of cards with different attributes and battle other players in skills-based matches. It is a game where players can buy, sell and trade their digital assets just as they would with physical trading cards games such as Magic the Gathering, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!

Splinterlands was created as players lost the ability to truly own their assets (or trading cards) once games went digital. With blockchain technology, it allows players to own and trade their digital assets freely once again. It also allows the game to have true scarcity and transparency, which means all cards on Splinterlands have a verifiable supply and historical record.

Players battle other players by choosing ranked or practice battles. With ranked battles, players can increase their rating. There is no downside to playing ranked battles as a beginner since players with a rating below 100 do not lose ranking points. Battles take place between players of similar strength. When matched up with an opponent, both players choose a set of six monster cards and one summoner card for the battle to destroy all their opponent’s monster cards and win the battle.

Although the game is free-to-play, players need to purchase the summoner’s spellbook for $10 if they want to unlock the game in full. With the summoner’s spellbook, players get access to their account keys and unlock the ability to earn Dark Energy Crystals, which can be redeemed for real currency.

Splinterlands started in May 2018 and launched Splintershards (SPS) – its governance token for the SPS decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) at the end of July 2021. It concluded a $3.6M private token sale for 6.6% of the SPS token supply. After reaching 100,000 players in its first three years, it added another 50,000 in just over a month from June 2021. Splinterland plans to build out its game in the latter half of 2021, with oracle integration planned for Q1 2022.

Splintershards

saffron.finance

JOE (JOE) is the native token of Trader Joe, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain that offers DeFi services, including swapping, staking and yield farming. The exchange has been growing rapidly, attracting over $4 billion in total value locked (TVL) since it was launched in June 2021. Trader Joe claims to take a community-first approach, and to prioritize innovation, speed and safety. It aims to provide a one-stop-shop DeFi experience and to integrate new products without compromising on security. To achieve this, Trader Joe has outlined an ambitious roadmap that focuses on token-holder growth. It plans to have improved staking, non-fungible-token (NFT) exchange listings, the collateralization of the JOE token, and leveraged trading –– all during 2021.

BENQI is a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market as well as a liquid staking protocol built on the high-speed Avalanche smart contract network. The lending protocol allows users to lend, borrow, or earn interest using their digital assets.  The Liquid Staking protocol provides a solution for capital efficiency, offering users the opportunity to unlock their “staked” AVAX to be used on Decentralized Financial protocols

The founding team chose Avalanche because of its decentralized network’s claimed high scalability, low fees and compatibility with popular plugin wallets.

BENQI was founded in 2021 with $6 million in backing. Among its strategic investors are Ascensive Assets, Dragonfly Capital, Mechanism Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Spartan Group, TRGC, Woodstock Fund, Ava Labs, Morningstar Ventures, GBV Capital, Skynet Trading Ltd, Rarestone Capital, Genblock Capital, Moon Inc.

Who Are the Founders of BENQI?

Rome Blockchain Labs Inc. is responsible for the development of BENQI. It is an incubator and a software development firm specializing in decentralized finance (DeFi). JD Gagnon is one of the co-founders and CEO of Rome Blockchain Labs. The two other co-founders are Hannu Kuusi and Alexander Shul.

JD Gagnon graduated with a bachelor’s degree in commerce in finance and accounting from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Before Rome Blockchain Labs, Gagnon has created the Velox algorithmic trading platform. Gagnon is also the founder and CEO of Scotch & Ramen Media, Inc. and CSO of Etheralabs, Inc.

Hannu Kuusi has experience building institutional-grade infrastructure for financial technology (fintech) and military applications.

Alexander Szul is in charge of managing the development of the BENQI liquidity market platform.

What Makes BENQI (QI) Unique?

BENQI (QI) claims to be the first DeFi Lending project on the Avalanche platform. It offers DeFi users from congested and centralized networks the option to move and place their unused assets on BENQI with no hurdles and low network fees. Avalanche allows BENQI users to seamlessly and affordably access decentralized financial services and increase control over their strategies.

Developers have the option to use BENQI to create financial products using the protocol and governance tokens.

BENQI also aims to ease the overloading of the Ethereum network by providing Ethereum users with a less expensive and faster alternative. BENQI members can withdraw liquidity from the shared liquidity market, borrow from the liquidity market and get a clear view of interest rates.

BENQI

Anchor Protocol is a lending and borrowing protocol offering up to 19.5% yield on stablecoin deposits. Lenders can deposit their UST and earn attractive rates on their investments while simultaneously benefiting from low volatility. Borrowers can turn their LUNA collateral into productive assets without giving up control of it.

Anchor Protocol can thus attract risk-averse investors looking for high-yield, low-volatility investments and increase demand for UST. This advances the adoption of UST as a stablecoin and subsequently the adoption of the Terra project in DeFi. With the increasing adoption of Terra, whose founders are behind the launch of Anchor Protocol, the price of LUNA will increase.

Anchor Protocol

Moonriver is an Ethereum-compatible, smart-contract parachain on Kusama. It is intended to be a companion network to Moonbeam, where it will provide a permanently incentivized canary network. New code will ship to Moonriver first, where it can be tested and verified under real economic conditions. Once proven, the same code will ship to Moonbeam on Polkadot.

It does this by providing a full EVM implementation, a Web3-compatible API, and bridges that connect Moonriver to existing Ethereum networks.

This allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonriver with minimal changes.

Moonriver

Polkastarter is a decentralized fundraising platform empowering Web3 projects to launch and raise funds through multi-chain token pools whilst significantly growing their communities.

The platform supports initial dex offerings (IDOs) across major blockchains, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Polkadot, Polygon, Avalanche and Celo.

The platform enables investors to secure early access to IDOs, NFTs and Gaming Web3 innovation. It is most commonly used by early-stage blockchain projects that want to raise capital and easily distribute their tokens at the same time.

Through Polkastarter, blockchain projects can easily create their own fixed-chain swap pools, which allow them to securely raise funds, while users can invest without risks, since swaps are automatically executed by smart contracts.

POLS is the native utility token of the Polkastarter platform. Its main utility is gaining access to pools and giving projects the option to give priority access to POLS holders. Users are incentivised to stake POLS, rewarding the most loyal members.

In Q4 2022, Polkastarter will release new community utility features, such as governance and POLS Power Boosters (increasing your allowlisting success). The platform first went live in December 2020, and has quickly grown to become one of the most commonly used platforms for initial DEX offerings (IDOs) operating on the Ethereum blockchain.

Polkastarter

Secret (SCRT) is a privacy-oriented blockchain built on Cosmos. Its smart contracts are called Secret Contracts and allow DApps to use private data on Secret, similar to how smart contracts operate on other blockchains. However, Secret Contracts transfer encrypted inputs into encrypted outputs without exposing data. This is made possible thanks to the encrypted contract states during the execution.

Data privacy is guaranteed by combining encryption protocols and key management within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This allows Secret Contracts to compete for several privacy-related use cases that traditional blockchains have found difficult to accommodate. For instance, private voting mechanisms or credit scoring applications become possible since they do not expose sensitive user data on-chain with Secret.

Secret

Audius is a decentralized music streaming protocol initially built on POA network, but now living on Solana. Audius was launched to remedy the inefficiencies of the music industry, which is plagued by intransparent music rights ownership and intermediaries standing between artists and their audience.

Audius aims to align the interests of artists, fans, and node operators through its platform powered by its native AUDIO token. Artists can upload music, stored and distributed by content and discovery nodes, that fans can listen to for free. Currently, Audius rewards content creators through rewards like featuring in the weekly trending lists. In the future, it plans to integrate stablecoins for artists to offer paid content, as well as artist tokens that give fans the ability to access exclusive content, potentially cooperating with platforms like Rally.

Audius

MIR is the governance token of Mirror Protocol, a synthetic assets protocol built by Terraform Labs (TFL) on the Terra blockchain.

Mirror Protocol is decentralized from day 1, with the on-chain treasury and code changes governed by holders of the MIR token. TFL has no intention of keeping or selling MIR tokens, and there are no admin keys or special access privileges granted. The intent for this is to be a completely decentralized, community-driven project.

Mirrored assets are blockchain tokens that behave like "mirror" versions of real-world assets by reflecting the exchange prices on-chain. They give traders the price exposure to real assets while enabling fractional ownership, open access and censorship resistance as any other cryptocurrency. Unlike traditional tokens which serve to represent a real, underlying asset, mAssets are purely synthetic and only capture the price movement of the corresponding asset.

Mirrored assets provide the following advantages:

Global Accessibility: In most markets outside of Europe & North America, access to foreign equities and forex markets is highly limited. Crypto allows global accessibility without entry barriers.

Fractional Orders: In traditional finance, to execute a fractional order, multiple fractional orders are bundled together to execute a unitary transaction. The process of gathering all the orders into one requires additional waiting time. By utilizing the blockchain, orders volume is simply represented as a number on the blockchain, so there is no need for the intermediary bundling process.

Nearly-Instantaneous Order Execution: Oftentimes due to the lack of liquidity (price-time-priority order book algorithm), orders can take up to a day to fully execute. Given the fact that Mirror relies on liquidity provided by each individual asset pool, orders can be executed as fast as the blocktime of the network (~ 6 seconds).

Mirror Protocol

Karura is an all-in-one decentralized finance (DeFi) hub and stablecoin platform built on Kusama (KSM) and integrated into Polkadot (DOT). Karura was created by the Acala Network, which has won four Web3 Foundation grants and founded the Substrate Developer Academy.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Karura.

Both Karura and Acala are backed by multiple funds, including Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital and Hypersphere. Karura and Acala operate in parallel. Specifically, Karura is implementing DeFi on Kusama in the same way that Acala is offering DeFi on Polkadot. The network is built with almost the same codebase as Acala: the two platforms provide scalable, convenient and fast DeFi cross-chain ecosystems for Kusama and Polkadot.

Parachain Karura is a platform that allows users to create effective, low-cost and complex financial applications, saving time and increasing trading efficiency.

The platform itself provides a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets (kUSD), a trustless staking derivative (liquid KSM), and an automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX) for unlocking liquidity and supporting financial innovation.

Karura is the decentralized financial hub of Kusama, a scalable multi-chain network for radical innovation and early-stage Polkadot deployments. Karura is the sister network to Acala. It hosts multichain liquid staking token (LST) protocols (such as liquid KSM - LKSM), an AMM decentralized exchange, and an app platform that is EVM-compatible and highly customizable (based on Substrate). Karura is secured by Kusama, and is the liquidity gateway of Kusama parachains, Acala and L1/L2 blockchains

Karura

Efinity is a cross-chain NFT platform developed by Enjin and built on Polkadot. Efinity was created as the next generation blockchain for digital assets with the aim of adapting to the challenges of the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to the project.

The main specialization of the Efinity project is the NFT space. With the protocol, traders and gamers can create, distribute, transfer, sell and buy NFTs. Efinity aims to remove barriers to entry into the NFT space/decentralized gaming, and to simplify user experience and digital asset governance.

Efinity Token powers the entire Efinity ecosystem, EFI aims to prioritize the generation, transfer and purchase of tokens using an inter-chain infrastructure of protocols resulting in lower transaction fees. As for incentives, rewards on PoW blockchains with NFT functionality go to miners who create/trade tokens, thereby forming a community.

One of the long-term goals of Efinity is to become a hub for both fungible and non-fungible tokens, accepting tokens from any other chain, facilitating the pricing and exchange of NFTs, increasing transaction volume, and creating network effects.

In December 2021, the project won the Polkadot parachain auction, and in March 2022, Enjin launched their flagship parachain Efinity on the Polkadot Relay Chain — a blockchain platform that provides a decentralized parachain network where people havecontrol over their data and identity.

Efinity Token

Established in July 2020, TrustSwap is a diverse Web3 ecosystem creating secure infrastructure for blockchain builders and communities. The TrustSwap Launchpad is a leading Launchpad and IDO service, achieving the #1 spot on Cryptorank in 2023 for All-time High Returns and Average Returns. TrustSwap has launched over 55 projects with a collective fundraising of over $70 million.

TrustSwap is also the parent company of The Crypto App and Team Finance, which offer a suite of multi-chain services including crypto portfolio tracking, token and liquidity locks, minting, staking, and vesting-as-a-service.

SWAP token is the key to accessing guaranteed allocations in top-tier IDOs via the TrustSwap Launchpad. Staking more SWAP tokens longer increases your SWAP Score and unlocks higher allocations as well as other perks for top stakers.

TrustSwap

Bifrost is a multichain middleware platform that enables developers to create Decentralized Applications (DApps) on top of multiple protocols. Not restrained to a single blockchain, Bifrost creates a new environment where developers can combine the best protocols to develop substantially more scalable and flexible DApps.

With Bifrost, developers can write smart contracts for multiple blockchain protocols in an unified environment. They simply select the target blockchain for each part of the code, then Bifrost will transpile, compile, and deploy the code into the target blockchains at once. Developers can also easily operate their DApps and even switch the target blockchain as new and better protocols become available.

Bifrost has multiple components that allow for a seamless connection among all blockchains:

Recipe: A language application that defines the programming language of Bifrost and generates smart contract codes with guaranteed code-level flexibility.

Linker: A system that connects the user and Bifrost components, ensuring the seamless operation on top of multiple blockchains.

Builder: An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that offers a customized environment to use the comprehensive suite of features of Bifrost.

Gourmet: An automated testing environment for Bifrost service and smart contract development, updating with the latest technologies for blockchain.

Scan: A dashboard that provides you with a full view of the internal process of Bifrost and shows your blockchain interconnectivity in diagram.