The Top Five Solana Infrastructure Projects

We recently added Solana to our data lake–now offering the first feature-complete indexing service for the ecosystem in private beta. We’re really excited about the opportunities in this vibrant ecosystem. For a more elaborate explanation of why we’re bullish on Solana, you can go here.

TL;DR: they’re doing something different, betting on hardware, and are highly committed, fast-moving, and unafraid of trying new things. 

With that out of the way, for developers and dApps entering any new ecosystem, the biggest question isn’t necessarily how much coin will potentially go up in the future - but what infrastructure there is to build on and with. 

And even for the degens, without infrastructure, there’d be no dogs wif hats to buy. That’s why, in this blog, we’ll introduce the Top 5 Solana infrastructure projects.

Let’s start with the first project, which brought liquid staking to Solana: Jito. 

Jito 

Liquid staking revolves around the idea of doing more with one’s staked assets. Staking usually requires locking funds up, which means you cannot use them for other purposes anymore. Liquid staking aims to enhance capital efficiency by giving you a liquid token representing your staked amounts and any rewards that accrue. 

Jito started in 2021 and operates on a stake pool model. When staking your SOL with Jito, you’re delegating to the pool. In return, you receive JitoSOL, which you can freely use across the Solana DeFi ecosystem. So far, not so different from what Lido is doing on Ethereum. However, what set Jito apart was their introduction of MEV to increase stakers earnings. 

Unlike in Ethereum, MEV is not a part of Solana’s native architecture, as it does not have a mempool where unconfirmed transactions are waiting to be included. Jito introduced this to the Solana ecosystem with their client architecture. 

When launched, Jito quickly became highly popular, now home to 132 validators and more than 89,000 stakers who have locked in 9 million in SOL TVL. 

In terms of infrastructure, Jito is interesting as it offers a place to stake SOL and has built mechanisms that weren’t native to the ecosystem. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who you ask), MEV did not seem to work out, and Jito decided to shut down its mempool at the beginning of March to prevent further rampant front-running. But even with that, there is a larger design space around liquid staking where stakers could secure other dApps (similar to what Eigenlayer is trying to build), therefore facilitating new entries to the ecosystem as they bootstrap security and liquidity. 

If you too want to liquid stake SOL, or just see what's happening at Jito, head here.

Pyth Network 

The next one on our list is Pyth, a novel oracle solution that aggregates price data directly from exchanges, market makers, and trading firms to resolve some bottlenecks of existing oracle solutions. 

In general, blockchains have no idea what’s happening in the real world. Oracles bridge that gap by bringing off-chain data on-chain. Existing oracles only focus on carrying data from an API to a smart contract but never from the real source, leading to high latency. 

Additionally, the data in most oracles often appears as an aggregate, even though price discovery is more nuanced than that, especially with an asset class trading 24/7 all around the world. 

Launched in 2021, Pyth is on a mission to make the world’s financial data available on the blockchain for devs every at low latency and high frequency. By getting data directly from first-party providers, Pyth guarantees timeliness and high quality. And not only that, the oracle network also features a way to express uncertainty around a price with confidence intervals.

Heisenberg would have loved it if he was still alive. 

Pyth initially launched on Solana as Pythnet using a fork of the Solana codebase. It has since gone multichain, supporting more than 40 blockchains with fast, permissionless, affordable, and reliable access to high-quality pricing data. 

For anyone building in crypto who needs high-speed financial data, Pyth Network is an invaluable platform. While it’s mostly pricing data for cryptocurrencies and other currencies for now, the Pyth model easily extends to include other financial data, potentially paving the way for institutions to enter. 

For more, head to the Pyth Website.

Wormhole 

Chances are the last time you heard about Wormhole was earlier this year when the team announced they’d be airdropping a token. However, Wormhole has been around much longer than that, spending more than 3 years building out the Wormhole ecosystem. 

While most will be familiar with the Wormhole bridge that connects Solana and Ethereum, the Wormhole protocol itself wasn’t conceived as “just” a protocol to facilitate bridging. Instead, Wormhole is a cross-chain protocol that offers a diverse range of products to facilitate cross-chain communication and messaging. 

The team started with a focus on bridging but has since pivoted to more broadly allow chains in the multichain world to interact and enable users to move their assets around freely. 

As of today, Wormhole supports over 30 different blockchains, including Layer-2 networks, and has processed more than 1 billion messages. 

Tools in the Wormhole ecosystem include their cross-chain messaging, on-chain querying, a token bridge, ways to move to Cosmos, and a protocol for native-level transfers. Builders can tap into Wormhole to facilitate: 

• Cross-chain exchange using Wormhole Connect 
• Cross-chain governance, if, for example, you have an NFT collection with holders on different chains 
• Cross-chain games: where the gameplay happens on Solana, but the character NFTs are on Ethereum, to provide an example. 

Wormhole itself is not a blockchain but it maintains smart contracts on all the chains it serves. The core of the Wormhole infrastructure is a network of Guardians (including top validators from companies like p2p validator & figment) who validate and sign messages authorizing actions across chains. Once a supermajority confirms an action, it’s passed to the relayer and then executed on the destination chain. 

Another crucial infrastructure piece to facilitate the seamless flow of assets across the chain and allow builders to capture their users wherever they are. 

You can learn more about Wormhole here.

Firedancer (not yet live) 

Even though this piece of infrastructure isn’t quite live yet, we’ve chosen to include it as it’s pretty hyped and also an important addition to the Solana landscape. It’s rare enough that people start discussing client software. 

The only reason it recently has been a topic of concern was the failure of an Ethereum minority client which took down part of the network, highlighting the fragility of the network. Taking a step back, clients are simply a piece of software. 

They turn computers into nodes and perform important tasks such as securing and maintaining the blockchain and acting as the interface between individual computers and the blockchain. As you can imagine, having one single client secure a majority of the stake is not an optimal setup in the spirit of decentralization. 

While the shock of a client failure has triggered projects in Ethereum to migrate to other clients on Solana, most still rely on the client provided by the Foundation. However, with Firedancer, a new client is on the horizon. 

And this one isn’t just exciting for increasing decentralization but also for the optimization it promises. ICYMI, Solana is all about getting the most out of the hardware. The JUMP team, developers of Firedancer have a decades-long track record with doing exactly that. 

As such, Firedancer will optimize for speed and add sharding, pushing validators to perform at the boundaries of hardware capabilities. During a live demo in 2022, the client already demonstrated 1 million transactions per second. 

Even if this number is likely to be lower in a production setting, it’d still be a tremendous increase in Solana's scalability. It's definitely one to keep an eye on. 

For more about Firedancer, visit their website.

Subsquid (Private Beta) 

Since this is our blog, it goes without saying that we’d mention ourselves as well. However, we do believe that we are bringing something to the Solana ecosystem that is highly beneficial for all the builders. 

One of the challenges for anyone developing on Solana is understanding and dealing with the differences in how data is stored and made available on Solana. For a long time, the best way to get historical data was to access centralized storage locations. It doesn’t help that Solana produces a lot of data, so much so that you could impossibly require every node to keep storing it and making it available. 

Enter Subsquid. Instead of having to access archive nodes or Google Big Table (even though, as someone integrated with Google Big Query, we certainly don’t object to using its analytic capabilities), devs can use the Subsquid data lake to build an indexer. 

What makes that different from other indexing solutions? For one, Subsquid’s data lake takes an unopinionated approach. We store the raw data so that experienced developers can define their own schema for retrieval. At Subsquid, we, too, believe that the next wave of adoption comes from those building at the edge, and that’s only possible if we enable developers to use their imagination, not by making decisions on their behalf up front. 

Subquid is also modular and infinitely horizontally scalable. What’s more, anyone building multichain dApps can access any EVM, Substrate, or Solana data from our data lake, reducing the need to maintain differing infra providers for that. 

Oh, and one more thing. We’re lightning fast. With Subsquid, you can sync 140,000 blocks per second. That’s more than 10x faster than any other indexer. 

Want to give it a try? 

Sign up here for our private beta.

For any other questions, please reach out on our Discord. We're happy to help.