Solana is drastically reducing TVL, what are they focusing on to develop?

The Solana ecosystem has many differences to attract developers and has a basis for many new breakthroughs. Good infrastructure with low transaction costs is an advantage compared to current layer 2 blockchains.

From a peak of $77.4 billion in November 2021, Solana 's market capitalization is just over $7.7 billion by March 2023. The total value of the ecosystem's key assets has dropped from $9.3 billion continuously to just over 200. million dollars. 

With a different platform design, Solana faced quite a lot of difficulties in retaining and attracting cash flow. Although the ecosystem has also developed many dapps similar to Ethereum and EVM compatible networks. But it is quite difficult for those dapps to boostraping the way the leading ecosystems with strong network effects can. 

The ecosystem's NFT trading volume doesn't have much of a breakout. The largest NFT exchange Magic Eden has also switched from focusing on Solana to supporting multiple chains. One of the popular collections on Solana is Degods which has also moved to Polygon. 

Besides, because of technical differences, Solana still has to "grove" quite a lot in development, which is why we see many problems happening in the network, even some quite serious problems that make the network go down. The network must be shut down, which significantly affects the user experience and trust. 

At the moment, most of the value is concentrated in Ethereum and EVM chains . With the feature of being open source, projects can be easily "copied" from previous projects, which saves a lot of development effort. But in the opposite direction we see these ecosystems have quite similar patterns and not many breakthroughs.

Solana is an ecosystem with many different approaches, such as: 

1. Being the first ecosystem outside of Ethereum to have a second client (Firedancer). This will help increase the stability, security, decentralization and interoperability of the network.

2. Develop Solana phones with specialized toolset, allowing developers to create decentralized applications on the phone. There are currently exclusive applications developed on Saga.

3. The environment is suitable for projects with novel concepts. Solana's fast speed, low cost is really becoming an advantage to incubate new projects.

Some projects with new concepts can be mentioned as: 

• StepN: Combining elements of running and tokenomics

• NFT backpack: Framework for creating, managing, and grouping NFTs.

• Monaco Protocol: Infrastructure for rapid development of betting platforms.

• Hivemapper: decentralized mapping project.

• Project Helium provides point of delivery network connectivity also moved back to Solana.

• Develop payment applications such as Solana Pay, Sphere.

• And there are many projects in many different fields that have been and are being developed.

In addition to having a suitable platform, Solana also continuously organizes events such as Hackathons, Hacker House which has shown initial results when the ecosystem is still receiving a lot of response from the community. 

For developers new to the ecosystem, they can easily find resources to support their learning. Tutorial aggregators, tools like Soldev, or even a Solana-related version of ChatGPT like Solana University are really bridging the gap in the developer community. 

Doing things differently has helped Solana stand out amid so many similar projects in the market. It is possible that the idea and quality of most projects on Solana are not yet complete, but similar to the StepN example, just one successful application will help accelerate the growth of the entire ecosystem.

Solana currently has problems with platform design and lack of products that really attract users. But with many new products being cherished and developed, promising to bring many surprises in the future.