8 Solana Tools You Should Know

January 11, 2022

Solana is a blockchain that’s cheaper and faster than Ethereum. And with it, you have a completely different set of tools.

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Solana (SOL) has been called the Ethereum (ETH) killer.

Solana is another layer 1 blockchain that is known to be faster and cheaper than Ethereum.

In the last year, Solana’s market cap has grown by ~62,000% to $53B.

A lot of projects are being built on Solana these days.

But since Solana and Ethereum are different blockchains, they have a different set of tools.

Here are the 8 Solana tools you need to know 👇

1. Coding Language

Developers need to know different coding languages.
ETH = Solidity
SOL = Rust

2. Wallet

You need to store your tokens and NFTs in different wallets.
ETH = Metamask
SOL = Phantom

3. Decentralized Exchange

Exchange your cryptocurrencies with other tokens/coins.
ETH = Uniswap
SOL = Radium

4. Borrowing & Lending

Borrow and lend your tokens/coins.
ETH = Aave
SOL = Solend

5. Domain Naming Service

This is what you use to purchase your domain. It is blockchain’s version of “.com”
ETH = ENS (.eth)
SOL = Bonfida (.sol)

6. NFT Marketplace

Buy and sell NFTs with others.
ETH = Opensea
SOL = Solanart

7. Block Explorer

Analytics platform to examine blockchain data.
ETH = Etherscan
SOL = Solscan

8. Community Management

Manage your gated community with tokens and NFTs.
ETH = Collab.land
SOL = Grape

9. Transactions Per Second (TPS)

This is not a tool, but had to include this difference in speed.
ETH = 15 (ETH 2.0 has potential for 100,000 TPS)
SOL = 50,000

10. Token Allocation

This is also not a tool but both have very different token allocation strategies. Solana sacrifices some decentralization for speed.
To learn more about Solana, check out Whiteboard Crypto’s video “What is Solana? SOL Explained with Animations”.

Key takeaway:

Solana is the new kid on the block and has a lot of strengths.
Even though it uses a different programming language, many people like it better because of its speed.
As such, it’s important to know the projects and tools that are being built on it
But this doesn’t mean that there will be a “winner takes all” scenario.
It’s very possible that the future is multi-chain, where there are multiple winners.

Sources

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jzROE6EhxM

https://messari.io/pdf/messari-report-crypto-theses-for-2022.pdf

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