Author: AI Publisher

Magic Eden launched on Solana in September 2021, founded by Zhuoxun Yin, Jack Lu, Sidney Zhang, and Zedd Yin. Within three months it was the dominant NFT marketplace on Solana, handling more than 90% of volume. At its peak in 2022, Magic Eden was valued at $1.6 billion in its Series B. It was one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in crypto history.

Then came the royalty wars. In October 2022, under pressure from professional traders who wanted lower fees, Magic Eden made creator royalties optional — a move that infuriated artists and communities who relied on royalty income. The backlash was brutal. Communities like DeGods publicly criticized the decision. Tensor, the trader-focused competitor, grew rapidly during this period. By early 2023, Magic Eden’s market share on Solana had cratered.

The comeback took time. Magic Eden reintroduced royalties, expanded to Ethereum, Polygon, Bitcoin Ordinals, and Base, and repositioned itself as a multi-chain retail marketplace rather than a Solana-only power tool. The ME token launched in December 2024 with a massive airdrop to users across all supported chains. The launch was chaotic — eligibility criteria sparked controversy — but by 2025 Magic Eden was back to being the largest NFT marketplace by user count, even if Tensor still dominated Solana trader volume.

The Magic Eden story is a lesson in the cost of trying to please your biggest customers. By catering to traders with the royalty change, Magic Eden briefly alienated the creators whose collections made the marketplace worth using at all. Getting both sides of a two-sided marketplace to trust you is hard. Losing one side’s trust can cost you the other. Magic Eden survived by admitting the mistake and rebuilding — but the scar from 2022 is still visible in its market share numbers.

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Helius launched in 2022, founded by Mert Mumtaz, as an RPC provider for Solana developers. RPCs are the unglamorous plumbing that lets applications read and write to a blockchain — boring infrastructure that nobody thinks about until it breaks. Helius’s pitch was simple: Solana’s public RPCs were unreliable, commercial alternatives were expensive and slow, and developers deserved better.

What separated Helius from other RPC providers was Mumtaz himself. He became the most visible Solana evangelist on Crypto Twitter, known for deeply technical threads explaining how Solana actually worked, aggressive debates with Ethereum maxis, and a willingness to admit Solana’s problems publicly. This personal brand became Helius’s growth engine. Every new Solana dev team knew who Mert was and defaulted to Helius RPCs.

By 2024, Helius was serving billions of requests per day across hundreds of Solana protocols. Jupiter, Kamino, Drift, Tensor, and pump.fun all ran on Helius infrastructure. The company expanded beyond basic RPCs into enriched APIs, webhooks, NFT indexing, DAS (Digital Asset Standard) support, and developer tooling that made building on Solana dramatically easier than building on comparable chains.

In 2024, Helius raised a $9.3M Series A led by Foundation Capital. In late 2024, the company announced Helius Mobile — a consumer Solana wallet aimed at making the mobile Solana experience competitive with CEX apps. Helius’s evolution from RPC vendor to full-stack Solana infrastructure company mirrors what Alchemy did for Ethereum. When a chain becomes a platform, the platform needs a developer-first provider that wraps the complexity in nice APIs. Helius became that for Solana, and Mert became Solana’s most reliable on-chain weatherman.

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Backpack was founded in early 2023 by Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver, formerly of FTX and Alameda. Ferrante had previously built Anchor — the most-used Solana smart contract framework — so he arguably understood Solana’s developer surface better than almost anyone. The timing was awkward: building a crypto company right after FTX collapsed, led by ex-FTX people, was a hard sell. But Ferrante pushed through.

Backpack’s first product was a browser-extension wallet with a novel feature: xNFTs, executable NFTs that could run full applications inside the wallet. It was a cool idea but didn’t take off. The second product changed everything: Backpack Exchange, a regulated centralized exchange based in Dubai, launched in February 2024. It was the first CEX to specifically court the post-FTX crypto-native power user who wanted CEX speed but didn’t want to trust another Sam.

Backpack Exchange grew fast. Its points program rewarded trading volume and locked SOL deposits. The exchange was one of the first to list new Solana memecoins at scale, giving it a wedge into the 2024 memecoin supercycle. By late 2024 Backpack was doing over $1B in daily volume and had become the default venue for trading newly launched Solana tokens the moment they went live.

The BPX token, when it launches, is expected to be one of the biggest airdrops of the cycle. Backpack’s customer file — crypto-native, high-volume, Solana-first — is exactly the user Memeshot and every other Solana product wants to reach. Armani’s ability to rebuild credibility after the FTX disaster, while hiring from inside the rubble, is one of the more impressive comebacks in crypto. Backpack shows that in this industry, reputation is not permanent and execution still beats history.

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Phantom launched in September 2021, a browser extension wallet for Solana built by Brandon Millman, Francesco Agosti, and Chris Kalani. The team came from 0x Labs and had been frustrated by how bad existing Solana wallets were. Their pitch: build the MetaMask of Solana, but with better UX, better security, and actually nice to use. It sounds simple. Nobody else had managed to do it.

Phantom grew explosively. By late 2021 it had over 2 million active wallets, and the Solana NFT boom pushed that number to over 3 million by the end of the year. Phantom raised a $109 million Series B in January 2022 at a $1.2 billion valuation, led by Paradigm. For a browser extension. That’s how big Solana’s wallet market looked at the time.

The 2022 bear market and FTX collapse nearly killed Phantom along with Solana. Active wallet counts dropped. The team pivoted to survive: shipping a mobile app, adding Ethereum and Polygon support, and focusing on retention instead of growth. The strategy worked. By 2024 Phantom was again the dominant Solana wallet, handling most of the memecoin trading flow that was making Solana the most active chain in crypto.

What Phantom got right that competitors didn’t was obsessive attention to the first-time user experience. Setting up a Solana wallet in Phantom takes 60 seconds. Swapping a token takes three taps. These sound trivial, but in an industry where wallet UX is notoriously bad, Phantom’s polish gave it a massive retention advantage. By 2025, Phantom was the single most-downloaded crypto wallet in the Apple App Store in multiple months of the year — a title it held because it kept focusing on the boring details nobody else bothered with.

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Drift Protocol launched on Solana in late 2021 as one of the first real perpetual futures DEXs on the chain. It grew fast. By early 2022 it had more than $100 million in TVL and was one of the top three perp venues outside centralized exchanges. Then Terra collapsed, UST went to zero, and a cascading liquidation event on Drift v1 broke the protocol so badly the team had to shut it down and rebuild from scratch.

Most teams would have quit. Cindy Leow, David Lu, and the Drift team didn’t. They spent most of 2022 rearchitecting the protocol, building a new orderbook model they called DLOB (Decentralized Limit Order Book), and launching Drift v2 in November 2022 — just as FTX was collapsing and nobody on Solana trusted anything. The timing was either brave or insane.

It worked. Drift v2’s hybrid model combined a virtual AMM backstop with a real cross-margin orderbook run by a network of “keepers.” Traders got CEX-level execution with self-custody. Over the next two years Drift climbed back, eventually surpassing its pre-collapse volumes. The DRIFT token launched in May 2024 with a fair airdrop to traders and liquidity providers.

By 2025, Drift was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in daily perps volume, competing with Jupiter Perps for Solana dominance and occasionally appearing in the top five non-CEX perpetual venues globally. The Drift comeback story matters because it’s one of the only examples in crypto of a protocol that publicly died and came back stronger. Most zombie protocols never recover. Drift did, because the founders refused to walk away when everyone else did.

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Raydium launched on Solana in February 2021, before almost any other major DeFi protocol on the chain. Built by a pseudonymous founder known as AlphaRay and his team, it was the first AMM on Solana to integrate with Serum’s central limit orderbook, giving liquidity providers both passive fees and orderbook liquidity access at the same time. The innovation was elegant — and for a time, nobody else was even trying.

Then FTX collapsed in November 2022, Serum died with it, and Raydium had to fork the Serum codebase overnight to keep functioning. Most observers wrote Raydium off. It was seen as a relic of the SBF era, attached to a broken orderbook. For almost a year it was barely relevant as Orca and Jupiter ate its market share.

Then pump.fun happened. The memecoin launchpad, by design, “graduates” tokens to Raydium when they hit a certain market cap — meaning every successful pump.fun coin automatically created a Raydium liquidity pool. Suddenly Raydium was processing billions of dollars in memecoin volume per day, and the RAY token, which had been sleeping for two years, ripped from under $0.20 to over $5. Daily fees reached millions of dollars, most of it flowing to RAY stakers.

The Raydium story is a lesson in crypto survival: sometimes you don’t win by being the smartest protocol, you win by being in the right place when the next cycle’s meta forms around you. Raydium had never pivoted to memecoins. Memecoins came to Raydium. And because the team had kept the lights on through the dead FTX year, they were ready when the volume arrived. In 2024 Raydium was the single most profitable protocol per unit of TVL in all of DeFi.

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Orca launched on Solana in early 2021, founded by Yutaro Mori and Grace Kwan, two engineers who had previously worked on Ethereum DeFi and wanted to build something more approachable. Their pitch was literally friendliness: while every other AMM targeted professional traders, Orca would build for normal humans who just wanted to swap tokens without reading a whitepaper. The logo was a cartoon orca. The UI had clear price impact warnings. It felt like a consumer product.

The strategy worked. By mid-2021 Orca was one of the top DEXs on Solana, holding its own against Raydium despite not having Serum orderbook integration. Then in March 2022, Orca launched Whirlpools — its concentrated liquidity AMM, directly comparable to Uniswap v3. This was a technical jump. Concentrated liquidity is hard to implement correctly, and Orca’s implementation became the default concentrated-liquidity venue on Solana for the next three years.

What Orca did differently from every other Solana DEX was patience. The team never launched a token during the 2021 bull market, even when peer protocols were doing $100 million IDOs. They waited. The ORCA token eventually launched, but quietly, and the team was far more focused on product and fee generation than on price. Through the 2022-2023 bear market, Orca kept shipping and its Whirlpools pools kept quietly accumulating real volume from serious LPs.

When the 2024 memecoin wave hit, Orca was positioned perfectly. Jupiter routed enormous flow through Whirlpool pools. LP APRs on popular pairs reached triple digits. By 2025 Orca was the second-largest Solana DEX by TVL and the top choice for any LP who wanted concentrated-liquidity exposure without babysitting positions. The cartoon orca had become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the chain.

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Marinade Finance launched on Solana in August 2021 as the first liquid staking protocol on the chain. The concept was borrowed from Lido on Ethereum: stake SOL, receive a tradable token (mSOL) that represents your staked position, and use that token across DeFi while still earning staking rewards. It was an obvious idea and somehow nobody else had shipped it on Solana yet.

Marinade grew fast because of its delegation strategy. Instead of concentrating stake on a few large validators, Marinade spread it across more than 450 validators using an automated scoring system that prioritized decentralization, uptime, and commission rates. For smaller validators, Marinade became the reason they could survive. This made Marinade beloved by the Solana validator community — a moat that turned out to matter a lot later.

At its peak in 2022, Marinade had more than $1.5 billion in TVL. Then Jito launched, Jito captured MEV rewards that Marinade couldn’t match, and users migrated in droves. Marinade’s market share dropped from majority to minority over 18 months. The team responded with Marinade Native (a non-liquid staking product), Marinade Earn, and new yield mechanisms, but the liquid staking war was mostly over. JitoSOL had won.

Still, Marinade matters as the protocol that proved liquid staking could work on Solana. The MNDE token remains a governance asset, the Marinade DAO is one of the most active on Solana, and mSOL is still widely used as collateral across Kamino, Drift, and Raydium. If you’re studying Solana DeFi history, Marinade is where the story of yield-bearing assets on the chain begins. It built the on-ramp that JitoSOL later paved over.

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Sanctum launched on Solana in 2023 with a weird and brilliant idea: what if there wasn’t just one liquid staking token, or ten, but thousands? What if any validator, any DAO, any project could mint their own LST in minutes? Sanctum built the infrastructure to make this possible, plus a unified liquidity layer called Infinity that let any Sanctum-minted LST swap instantly into SOL or any other LST without waiting for an unstake period.

The technical insight was subtle. Instead of having every LST fragment liquidity into its own pool, Sanctum treated all LSTs as fungible claims on the same underlying asset (SOL plus validator rewards) and pooled their liquidity. This meant a tiny new LST could launch with deep liquidity from day one, because it inherited Infinity’s entire pool. The UX for users was “click to swap any LST to any other LST.” The UX for validators was “mint your own liquid staking token in 30 seconds and instantly have liquidity.”

Sanctum’s CLOUD token launched in June 2024 with a ~$150 million FDV, distributed via a major airdrop to Solana power users. The launch was controversial because of eligibility filtering, but by 2025 Sanctum was the backbone of Solana’s liquid staking ecosystem, powering hundreds of LSTs including JupSOL (Jupiter’s), bonkSOL, hubSOL, and dozens of community-branded stakes.

The reason Sanctum matters beyond its own metrics is that it reframed what a liquid staking token is for. Before Sanctum, an LST was a financial product. After Sanctum, an LST became a community asset — a way for a project or DAO to let its fans earn yield while flying its flag. That’s a small conceptual shift with huge implications for how stake flows through the Solana validator set.

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In late 2017, a former Qualcomm engineer named Anatoly Yakovenko was sitting in an all-night diner in San Francisco, drinking too much coffee and sketching out a whitepaper. The idea that came to him that night would become Proof of History — a verifiable delay function that lets a blockchain agree on time without agreeing on state first. It was the missing piece that would let a chain run at 50,000 transactions per second instead of 15.

Yakovenko had spent over a decade at Qualcomm working on wireless protocols. He understood hardware. He believed blockchains were being built by people who had never touched a datacenter. His cofounders — Greg Fitzgerald, Raj Gokal, Eric Williams, Stephen Akridge — joined him at a tiny startup first called Loom, later renamed Solana after a beach town north of San Diego where they used to surf.

The first testnet launched in 2018. Mainnet Beta went live on March 16, 2020, at the exact moment COVID-19 was crashing global markets. SOL traded under a dollar for months. Nobody cared. Then 2021 happened: Sam Bankman-Fried discovered Solana, FTX pumped it, Serum launched on it, and SOL rallied from $1.50 to $260 in twelve months. Anatoly became the reluctant face of the “Ethereum killer” narrative he had never asked for.

What makes Yakovenko unusual among crypto founders is that he actually posts on Twitter like an engineer instead of a prophet. He admits when the network is down. He makes jokes about validators. He ships. When FTX collapsed in November 2022 and most people wrote Solana off as a zombie chain, Yakovenko kept his head down and kept shipping. Two years later the network was processing more real transactions per day than every other L1 combined. The beach-town chain had survived its own founder’s biggest backer going to prison.

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