- Ouija
Major DAOs in Solana Ecosystem
#13 Governance Series
Those who talk big should walk big. In order to compete with Ethereum, competitive blockchains must aim to be better in some aspects.
It is important to note that optimizing for certain properties may mean compromising on certain qualities, such as decentralization. This, however, is a topic for another time.
Solana claims to be the “fastest blockchain in the world” and “low cost, forever”. Their proposition is to scale and ensure composability, meaning they won’t require layer 2s or parallel chains, such as Ethereum and its Polygon sidechain.
In essence, Solana’s architecture centers around the use of validator clusters to serve client transactions and maintain their ledger. Clusters may coexist and may share genesis blocks. However, otherwise, simply ignore each other.
Polygon has native projects but can also benefit from Ethereum’s projects and products in a symbiotic nature, they engage in a positive sum game. Solana does not have this benefit. Instead, it has its own ecosystem.
The Solana blockchain is one of the fastest-growing alternative chains to Ethereum. It has a vibrant and growing community of developers and subsequent projects, products and DAOs. DAOs are helping to deepen the extent of network activity and growth.
Through DeepDAO and Messari’s Governor tools we can identify projects by their chain, type and activity. This does not measure their maturity, that would take multiple metrics, both quantitative and qualitative and is a challenge that StableLab is currently working on. Using both of these tools allows us to identify their health in market share and activity.
We can use the resources mentioned above to identify some of the more prominent DAOs, native to the Solana network. I have ordered them by market capitalization just as I did in the previous article; Major DAOs in the Polygon Ecosystem.
Mango Markets
Mango is an entirely permissionless, on-chain marketplace. It allows users to trade spot margined markets and leveraged perpetual futures, all cross-collateralized with up to 10x leverage.
It offers a host of products, including:
Spot margins
Perpetual futures
Liquidator and market-making programmes
Borrowing and lending
Merchandise
Mango Markets also features its own governance system in the form of MangoDAO. With a total treasury of £229 million, minus $173 million, it boasts a real worth of $56 million within its various vaults. Apart from controlling the Mango Market platform, MangoDAO additionally engages in active investing and grants.
UXD Protocol
UXD proposes to be a “fully collateralized decentralized stablecoin backed by delta-neutral positions using derivatives”.
UXD attempts to satisfy the “stablecoin trilemma”. It broke the components of the trilemma down and addressed each:
Decentralization. The protocol does not custody user assets, no users interact with any centralized entity. “Ensuring” users may transact without censorship
Stability. UXD is 100% backed by a delta-neutral position. Users will always be able to redeem 1 UXD for 1 USD worth of assets
Capital efficiency. Users can issue 1 UXD with 1 USD worth of assets without over-collateralization requirements
Their first derivative DEX was Mango Markets. In this, we can see that projects on Solana are beginning to interact with and support each other, helping to create and support a mutually beneficial ecosystem.
UXD protocol features a governance structure in the form of the UXP DAO. Users with the governance token UXP are able to vote on proposals that contribute to the continued growth of their protocol. Examples of proposals that UXP token holders can make could include:
Nominate/Add derivative exchanges
Nominate/Add assets to use as collateral, used to create the delta-neutral position
Adjust the distribution of the positive funding rate
Propose/Implement asset management strategies
Propose/Implement optimizations
Solend
Solend is an algorithmic, decentralized protocol for borrowing and lending. They identified that this is key in DeFi ecosystems and aim to scale it to become faster and cheaper.
Solend offers main features:
Earning interest as a lender
Borrowing
Leveraged long positions
Short positioning
Solend features permissionless pools. By bringing this product to the market, they follow through on their vision of true decentralized borrowing and lending. This allows any user to create an isolated pool. The features of permissionless pools allow for the following:
Faster token listings. This helps mitigate the limitations of the core Solend team, opening the floodgates for anyone to list any assets
Wider token utility. Any asset may be wrapped as an SPL token and accepted as collateral for a loan
A protocol-owned market. A designated 20% of origination fees generated by a pool is distributed to the creator, meaning that continued growth rewards both Solend and pool creators
Solend facilitates its governance through the SLND token. It has actively used this to great effect. A proposal on the 20th of June demonstrated this. To avoid a cascading liquidation event, Solend initiated a proposal to take control of a “whale’s” collateral. Another proposal on the 21st of June adjusted the protocols lending parameters and imposed a lending limit.
HoneyDAO
HoneyDAO is an investment DAO which features a collective of DeFi influencers, investors, developers and founders. They hope to improve Solana’s DeFi landscape by offering services to the projects that successfully acquire funding from them.
The services offered to projects help optimize growth, efficiency and effectiveness. This may come in many forms and include:
Content management
Social media support
Community management
Infographics
Beta testing
Influencer access
Code review
Expanding partnerships
Metaplex
Solana has an excellent reputation for launching non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Metaplex takes advantage of this. It features a collection of tools, smart contracts, etc., designed specifically for the process of creating and launching NFTs.
Their three main products are:
Token metadata. The NFT standard for Solana
The Candy Machine v2. A profile picture (PfP) focused tool, reminiscent of a gumball-style candy machine
Auction house. A decentralized sales protocol for NFT marketplaces
To date, the Metaplex ecosystem has achieved amazing landmarks; 15 million NFTs minted, and $3 billion in value distributed to creators across primary and secondary sales.
Thoughts
As with all emerging blockchains and ecosystems, each must create and establish its own infrastructure. Solana is no exception. Many teams and individuals continue to pioneer within the emerging crypto sector, so there will continue to be an increasing need to formulate and maintain competent and resilient projects and their subsequent governance structures.
Many of these projects already feature a governance model, and some may need to implement a decentralized form of governance but are yet to do so. StableLab is uniquely positioned to offer professionally tailored governance solutions and product-specific services. Reach out on https://twitter.com/StableLab or follow us for more similar DAO ecosystem analysis.
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