Partnerships
The Solana ecosystem is absolutely massive, and it's constantly growing. It's home to DeFi projects, NFT marketplaces, crypto lending protocols, and Web3 apps. During 2021, the number of projects on Solana grew from 70 to more than 5,100.
Here's a selection of a few notable partners and projects:
- Solana and crypto exchange FTX worked together to build Serum, a high-speed, decentralized crypto exchange on Solana's blockchain.
- Michael Jordan launched his debut NFT collection on HEIR, a Solana-based platform.
- NFT marketplace OpenSea is now listing Solana-based NFTs. It previously only offered Ethereum-based NFTs.
- Audius, an app designed to build a decentralized music community, chose to move to Solana. It researched more than 20 blockchain platforms before deciding.
- Solana also partners with the Arweave blockchain to permanently store large amounts of Solana's data, including transaction history and NFT data files.
Can I make passive income with Solana?
You can make passive income with Solana. Since Solana uses proof of stake to validate transactions, it gives you the opportunity to stake your crypto and earn rewards.
When you stake Solana, you pledge your SOL tokens to a validator node that checks transactions. In return, you'll receive a portion of the block rewards that the validator receives. It requires setting up a blockchain wallet and choosing a validator, but it's a good way to get more SOL tokens.
It's always worth mentioning that cryptocurrency is a very different type of passive income than cash. Like other cryptocurrencies, Solana is volatile. If the price drops, your earnings might not make up for the losses.
Unique risks
Solana's not without its issues. The most prominent is an uneven power structure, which you can see in both its initial token distribution and its validators.
Crypto research company Messari found that 48% of Solana's initial token allocation went to insiders, including the team, company, and venture capital companies. Another 13% went to the Solana Foundation.
The Solana network has well over 1,000 validators, but more than one-third of the cumulative stake is held by fewer than 25 validators. This means a relatively small number of validator nodes are responsible for verifying more than a third of Solana's transactions.
Outages have also become a concern as Solana has grown more popular. The Solana network experienced multiple outages in both 2021 and 2022, including a 48-hour outage in January 2022 that liquidated many users of the Solend lending protocol.
It takes time to stabilize a blockchain, and Solana is far from the only one to go through outages. But the frequency has attracted criticism and worried Solana supporters. Additionally, Solana has not yet declared the blockchain's mainnet to have completed its "beta" development period.
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