TVL on Solana

Q77. With the market conditions souring over the last few months, how has that affected TVL (total value locked) in defi on Solana? Highlight three projects of your choosing (reference this for the list of top projects by TVL https://defillama.com/chain/Solana) and highlight key metrics and insights on each project to investigate what is influencing shifts in TVL and the number of users over time. What factors in the market or specifically about the projects cause TVL fluctuations?

Introduction

For this Bounty, I will look into the TVL of Solana in the past few months. I will also look at different protocols that have been launched on Solana to see if they have successfully onboarded new users.

The dashboard will be based on data from DefiLlama and I will plot any charts using python!

How is the TVL looking like...

By looking directly at what DefiLlama shows, we can see that the USD TVL has been decreasing quite rapidly since the beginning of 2022 - however, contrastingly, the TVL in SOL has kept a constant upward trend since April 2021. It looks like the users prefer to hodl SOL instead of keeping straight USD on the Solana network.

Let's re-plot these graphs over the past 30 days (in python) to make sure that this data is consistent and correct, and also to closely see what has been happening in the past month.

Projects that attract users to Solana

Let's look at the most successful projects now, projects that have the biggest TVL % increase in the past 30 days:

We can see that the most attractive to users protocol in the past month has been Dual Finance, which is a yield generation project. Users deposit tokens into the smart contract and receive yield in exchange for covered calls being sold against the deposited tokens.

Swim Protocol has also been quite successful, with the total TVL being just over $40M. It allows users to transfer tokens across chains via multi-token liquidity pools and Solana’s Wormhole. It has been quite successful as it provides users with no delays during transfers, no need for centralized bridges or wrapped assets.

Let's now look at the projects with the biggest TVL overall:

As we can see, the biggest TVL overall is in Solend, which allows users to lend and borrow assets within the Solana network. It is the most successful project as it claims to be 100x faster and 100x cheaper compared to other slow and expensive products. Solend aims to be the easiest to use and most secure solution on Solana.

Solend's TVL in USD and SOL since its inception:

Conclusion

There are many interesting and successful projects built on Solana. Whether they provide a standard borrow/lend option or allow users to swap their assets without the need of going into centralised networks, it is clear that Solana's overall TVL is increasing over time. We can see that users like hodling SOL instead of USD, probably due to the speculation that it will increase in value in the future. Overall, it is clear that Solana is a successful network with many great projects!