A stable growth ecosystem, organized investments and a healthy derivatives market are strong signals that Solana (SOL) will remain a good candidate for 2022 as well.

SOL has become a shining star in the smart contracts space, and over the past year the total network value (TVL) has increased by $ 660 million and includes over 40 distributed applications (dApps). high (ATH) over $ 11 billion.

Despite this growth, investors have reason to wonder whether the current market cap of $ 54.3 billion makes sense and whether it compares to competing networks like Binance, Smart Chain (BNB), Avalanche (AVAX) and Polygon (MATIC) .

BNB, AVAX, MATIC and SOL are quoted in USD | Source: TradingView

By analyzing the price development over the last six months, Terra (LUNA),SOL and Avalanche have a clear separation compared to competing smart contract platforms.

Desires for the Solana ecosystem

SOL market cap is more than double that of Avalanche and Terra, with market caps of $ 25.7 billion and $ 25.2 billion, respectively.

The latest news from SOL reveals an exciting array of institutional investments, from the $ 314 million private sale of Solana Labs in June to a $ 18 million fundraiser in September from Polychain, Wildcard and Three Arrows.

There is solid evidence of a burgeoning ecosystem, judged by investor appetites. However, to understand how successful SOL’s scalability can be, we need to evaluate usage metrics.

It is possible to look at the number of active addresses on the Solana dApp for a more complete view.

The most active dApps from Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche and Polygon in 7 days | Source: DappRadar

Ethereum’s top dApp according to active addresses is Uniswap with 188,200. As a result, Raydium’s 97,600 weekly users are pretty impressive when it launched 10 months ago. Meanwhile, Uniswap raised more than $ 4.3 billion in TVL in February 2021.

As for SOL’s Magic Eden NFT market, its 58,400 weekly active addresses also make up more than half of Ethereum’s OpenSea, which is the absolute leader in the industry in terms of numbers and user activity.

Avalanche’s user activity is heavily focused on the decentralized financial app Trader Joe, but its $ 715 million weekly trading volume pales in comparison to Uniswap’s $ 22.1 billion or $ 0.5 billion Raydium. The same goes for Polygon with $ 573 million in trading activity on QuickSwap DEX.

Solana has the third largest futures market

Solana currently holds the third largest Open Interest (OI) in futures. This index aggregates the total number of contracts held by market participants regardless of recent trading activity.

Total open interest of the Solana futures | Source: CoinGlass

Despite the sharp decline since peaking at $ 1.9 billion on Nov. 8, current open interest in futures of $ 860 million has made Solana the third largest derivatives market. Binance Coin (BNB) futures now have an open interest of $ 520 million, followed by Terra (LUNA) with $ 430 million.

Solana is a leader in the TVL, user and derivatives markets

There is no doubt that there is impressive activity emanating from Solana’s on-chain data and derivatives markets. The network’s TVL has grown 15x in the past six months, and Solana’s dApp users are nearly half that of the Ethereum network.

Solana appears to be quickly closing the gap on three key metrics: TVL, active users, and the derivatives market. Competitors like Terra, Avalanche and Polygon appear to be far behind, which could justify the high market capitalization.

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