Ethereum Watch

The Solana and Serum ecosystem has several promising new entrants. 

More Growth on Solana 

Solana and Serum have announced the results of their recent DeFi hackathon. 

The projects recently hosted a two-week event, inviting over 3,000 builders to develop new projects on top of Solana and Serum. 

One of the first-place winners was Mango Markets, a cross-margin trading protocol that integrates Serum’s on-chain order book. Mango Markets will offer 5x leverage, a rarity in DeFi today. It will also only charge users for trading fees. Users will also be able to use SRM in the Mango Markets pool to reduce the Serum fees for all users. 

The other winner was PsyOptions, which replicates U.S.-style trading options within the Solana ecosystem. It will feature SPL token support and use Serum to create the financial contracts. 

The winners were selected based on five categories: functionality, potential impact, novelty, design, and composability.

Judges included key figures from Solana, Chainlink, Sushi, Multicoin Capital, Circle, Parafi Capital, and CoinGecko. 

The top nine winning teams will have the opportunity to compete for an additional $200,000 seed funding prize. 

Sam Bankman-Fried, who advises Serum and is known for evangelizing Solana, spoke of his enthusiasm for the hackathon projects. He said: 

“It seems like there will be multiple, really awesome protocols going fully live from the hackathon, which should help continue to build out the Serum ecosystem. I was really excited to see the projects from the first hackathon, and these ones are even better. ”

Anatoly Yakovenko, President of the Solana Foundation, also said that he was “thrilled” with the standard of the competition’s entrants. He added: 

“Solana was built to scale DeFi to global adoption, and this hackathon gave builders an opportunity to leverage the chain’s speed and composability. We are looking forward to further supporting teams as DeFi rapidly expands onto the Solana blockchain.”

The hackathon is a further sign of development on the Solana blockchain, hoping to capture a portion of the DeFi market that Ethereum currently dominates. Arguably Solana’s biggest advantage over Ethereum is its ability to process high-speed, low-cost transactions. One of the Solana ecosystem’s key components is Serum, a decentralized exchange (DEX) tailored for decentralized finance.

Both projects have a long way to go to catch up with Ethereum, however. The second-ranked blockchain processes over 1 million transactions daily, significantly more than any of its competitors. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies. 

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