Try Quests to earn SOLSustained Development: The Case of Solana after the FTX Collapse
Open Analytics Bounty: Solana (December 3)
Overview
The sudden collapse of FTX shacked the crypto market on November 8th, 2022 again. Among major chains, Solana was hit harder due to its relations with FTX.
Is Solana dying?
One way to track the growth or decline of a blockchain is by analyzing the expansion or shrinking of developers on the very chain. This dashboard focuses on the development and popularity of programs/contracts. First, we describe what has happened to the SOL price and popularity since the FTX incident. Then, the trend of use of programs/contracts and the number of new contract development will be investigated by visualizing the number and type of program developments per day.
The graph below shows how Sol price has been changed since the beginning of November. As a base BTC price is shown in the same graph.
We can see that SOL price has decreased more than BTC price. The data shows that SOL price has dropped 71% since its peak on November 5th while BTC price has decreased only 27% during the same time.
Graphs below show the number of transactions and number of new contracts over time. We can see that weekly number of developments on Solana increased in the week after the incidents, but later it decreased significantly.
The number of transactions has sharply decreased after the incidents. However after a week it reached almost same level of before the incident.
Breaking down the contract data into types and labels we can see that after the FTX collapse both the type and the protocols used has changed.
Graphs below show that after the FTX incident DEXes has decreased significantly while dapps has growth.
Also the data shows that Serum was replaced by Openbook after the incident.
At aggregated level we can see that while in the last three months before the incident dexes contracts were used by people considerably, after the FTX collapse dapps became popular.
Also the dominance of NFT Contracts and Defi contracts has slightly increased after the incident.
Graphs below also show the same trend with different perspective.
Tables below lists top contracts before and after the FTX collapse. We can see a major change with this regard.
In this dashboard, firstly, the trend of unique programs used by wallets was shown. The data showed that the number of daily unique programs used has decreased after a constant growth in 2022. We can conclude that the Solana ecosystem has lost its expansion. However, we do not see a long-term effect of the FTX incidents on development. Apparently the FTX shock is turning to a normal trend of using diverse contracts on the blockchain.
Secondly, the most popular programs were identified and compared before and after the incident. We can see that DEXes lost their popularity.
Please note: This shift in the type of contracts can be caused by Flipside’s labeling.
Particularly, Serum DEX Program v3, a decentralized exchange (DEX), was replaced by Openbook.
We can conclude that while the price of SOL unprecedently decreased after the FTX collapse and the liquidity locked on the SOL was shrunk remarkably, the development still is less affected by the incident and developers continue building.
Looking into the number of contracts/programs used by users per day, we can see that the rapid growth at the beginning of 2022 has flattered since June and the daily number of contracts used on Solana started decreasing in mid-October.
The data shows that the decreasing trend became sharper after the FTX collapse. However, there is a turnaround towards the end of November. This U-curve in the trend of developments used begs further exploration.
The question is whether the downward trend of the popularity of Solana is turning back or whether more development is undergoing on top of the Solana blockchain.