Top 10 Projects Running on Solana by CoinMarketCap

10. Mercurial Finance
Mercurial Finance was the first Solana-based project that focused on stablecoin trading. DeFi Alliance gave the platform a starting investment of $100,000– an industry accelerator.

The platform currently has $62.57 million in total value locked. Additionally, the token is available on FTX, Gate.io, Raydium, and Serum Dex. 50% of the token distribution goes to the Marcuial Foundation, 10% to the team, and 20% is allocated for private sale.

09. Parrot Protocol
Parrot Protocol is the DeFi network focusing on providing users access to value locked in DeFi systems. The project has its own stablecoin API pegged to $1, therefore allowing holders to borrow against lenders and retrieve their locked value seamlessly. Parrot Finance also offers a governance token to anyone who wants to lock their tokens. This application currently has $86.86 million in total value locked. Additionally, it has raised $84 million after two successful IDOs.

Parrot Protocol has grown to offer a full suite of DeFi products, meanwhile, the supply of Parrot is capped at $2.1 billion. Other than its tech heavy capabilities, Parrot Protocol also has seamless UI.

08. Mango Markets
Mango Markets holds $126.39 million in total traded volume. The platform originally started as a lending platform and then raised $70 million in its MNGO token sale in August 2021. Since then, Mango Markets expanded to include Mango DAO which currently has a treasury balance of $871 million and 92 DAO proposals.

Daffy is one such creator of those DAO proposals. They are funding $1.5 million for backing Mango Labs in order to create a mobile app, improve marketing-making tools, and also creative Manga v4. According to Daffy, this DAO should help Mango become censorship-resistant.

07. Larix
Larix is a metaverse-based financial protocol. Its offering expanded beyond the usual lending pools and was the first protocol offering mortgage lending with auto compounding. LARIX is priced at $0.007 with the total value locked currently being $135.86 million.

Larix Protocol is also partnering with Soldex.ai, the Solana Build Decentralized Exchange. This partnership means Soldex would gain from Larix’s exposure. At the same time, Larix would gain from Soldex being the fastest third-generation decentralized exchange.

06. Orca
Orca is one of the top decentralized exchanges that was built on Solana. The exchange boasts a large traded volume with an impressive $516.6 million in total value locked. The exchange was first brought into the market back when there was very little infrastructure on Solana.

The project has just recently received $118 million in funding, led by Three Arrows Capital. Other than a large backing, Orca also stands out for its ‘human-centred’ unique design. The DEX has unique features such as fair price indicators and the imagine bar. The UI design process involves interviewing users and observing how they used existing products to identify pain points and areas for improvement.

05. Saber
Saber provides liquidity for people to easily swap between different stable pairs of assets, making a huge impact on the Solana ecosystem. It offers liquidity for USDT / USD and SOL; and even Bitcoin pools. This market maker has a cross-chain approach that bridges other blockchains such as Ethereum, Celo, BSC, and Terra.

Saber has become one of the largest stablecoin swaps on the Solana ecosystem in a short amount of time. Additionally, it has an active community on Twitter and Medium.

04. SolFarm
SolFarm is a DeFi app that raised $5 million and expanded its offering with lending investors including Jump Capital and Alameda Research. Its native token is the Tulip Token. The platform allows users to utilize the low cost and high speed when on a blockchain. As a result, users can benefit from competitive staking rewards.

Despite being high on the list, SolFarm with the ticket TULIP only holds a market cap of $11 million at this moment. The price is significantly lower than the November 2021 highs of $49.82.

03. Serum Dex
Serum Dex is the largest when it comes to the total value locked with $959.9 million in current total value locked. Only a bit short of $1 billion in total value. Serum Foundations is created by FTX, Alameda Research, and others. It is also co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried who has recently been labeled the world’s youngest billionaire.

This decentralized exchange is fast, cheap, and permissionless. The main object of the platform is to give users a weir range of prices and order sizes by using decentralized order book operated by smart contracts. As a result, this would give users total power over trades. Serum Dex supports cross-chain trading which allows users to also optimize other platforms like ETH competitors.

02. Raydium
Raydium is the largest automated market on the Serum DEX with $1.05 billion locked in. The RAY token has a price history and is available from February of 2021, hitting an all-time high of just $16.93. Additionally, it has a total supply of 550 million.

Raydium allows users to earn yields, take part in IDOs, and exchange tokens. Projects can also utilize the platform to act as a market maker and exchange; fundraise for new ideas, or even scale to improve their business.

01. Solana
Finally, there’s Solana itself with $54.6 billion in total value locked. Solana’s main objective is to host scalable applications. Solana can process up to 50,000 transactions per second. Meanwhile, Visa can only do half of that speed, and Ethereum can only do 54 transactions per second. The consensus behind Solana is the reason for its impressive speed and scalability. It uses a new concept called Proof of History, rather than Proof of Stake or Proof of Work.