The universe of the $10 billion man SBF: What is the connection between the FTX family and the Solana ecosystem?

On February 22, the cryptocurrency market faced a severe price correction, with Bitcoin sliding from its high of $58,000 to $45,000, a drop of over $10,000. Most other coins also fell by over 20%. While Ark Invest's Cathie Wood viewed this as a healthy pullback and remained optimistic about Bitcoin in an interview with Bloomberg, many investors found it difficult to cope during these days. However, there was a group of people who had a stable and happy few days amidst the market turmoil – the followers of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), supporters of the Serum ecosystem, and investors in SBF concept stocks. Data shows that most SBF concept coins outperformed the market during the downturn, with tokens like RAY, SRM, SOL, and later FTM, which was announced as an investment, rising against the trend by 30% to over 100%. Why were these coins able to rise against the market downturn? Upon categorizing all SBF concept coins, it can be observed that almost all those that rose during this period were projects in the decentralized finance sector, namely "SBF DeFi concept coins." Is this merely a coincidence? Perhaps not.

Ringing the Battle Cry for DeFi Ecosystem

Ever since announcing the construction of a decentralized exchange Serum on the Solana blockchain last year and forming the ecosystem incentive node EcoSerum, SBF has officially sounded the first horn for entering the decentralized finance field, attempting to challenge Ethereum's dominant position in the DeFi space.

Current mainstream DeFi projects are built on the Ethereum blockchain. However, Ethereum is facing a serious issue of "high transaction fees," which has excluded retail investors with small capital from the ecosystem. Fundamentally, this goes against the original intention of DeFi for "financial inclusion."

Initially, the focus was on the development of Ethereum Layer2 to provide a solution to the high transaction fee issue. However, the rise of Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has led people to realize a different approach, that is, "other public chains/side chains as execution layers, with Ethereum as the security layer." With its speed and cost-effectiveness, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), coupled with the backing of Binance Exchange, has become a popular alternative. Binance successfully built its own DeFi ecosystem, and FTX, which sees Binance as its prime target, is likely to follow suit. In other words, SBF is probably also strategizing for its future DeFi ecosystem, and the recent surge in "SBF DeFi concept coins" may be the first drumbeat before action.

DeFi Landscape Gradually Maturing

Upon further examination of SBF's current DeFi ecosystem, it is evident that the various projects supported by SBF are important pieces of the ecosystem puzzle. While the core of the ecosystem, Serum, and the surging Raydium are both trading platforms with order book matching and automated market maker (AMM) functions, in the long run, Serum may lean towards advancing in the direction of derivative trading platforms, while Raydium plans to attract external liquidity through collaboration with SushiSwap and liquidity mining incentives, focusing on AMM services.

However, this alone is not enough. Key infrastructures of the DeFi ecosystem such as the "lending market," "synthetic asset protocols" that can introduce real-world assets, "oracle" systems for trusted data sources, and "decentralized stablecoin issuers" have yet to emerge. This means that the current state is still far from the ideal DeFi ecosystem envisioned by SBF.

Nevertheless, the good news is that FTX's upcoming IEO project in March, Oxygen, may fill the gap in the ecosystem's "lending market." Users of the Oxygen platform can deposit various digital assets through a mobile app to form collective pools of funds for various operations such as staking rewards, lending, trading, synthetic assets, etc., improving users' fund efficiency and returns. The ecosystem will also have more liquidity for financial activities like leveraged financing. Additionally, the collaboration between FTX and the offline map app Maps.me through Oxygen will provide a variety of financial services to its users. The platform's emergence will play a crucial role in the entire ecosystem.

Furthermore, FTX's partnership with PayPal to facilitate fiat currency deposits and collaboration with payment processor SwipeSXP to launch the FTX Card may connect lifestyle applications, investment management, and payment flows, potentially driving growth for the FTX ecosystem.

SBF Ecosystem Faces Native Barriers: User Habit

Compared to Ethereum and BSC, the current SBF ecosystem still has inherent barriers that users need to adapt to. Most users are accustomed to the operation methods of Ethereum and wallet tools like MetaMask. BSC, due to directly copying Ethereum's code, allows users to seamlessly migrate. In contrast, Solana chosen by SBF, despite having low fees, has a different operating method in Solana wallets compared to Ethereum. This is because the system logic differs from Ethereum, akin to an iOS user switching to the Android operating system, where users would need more incentives to adapt or learn new operating modes.

However, it is worth emphasizing that Solana and Serum have already incorporated the integration of Metamask into their development plans to address this issue. With FTX's operational efficiency, Solana and Serum may soon provide a solution that rivals Ethereum and BSC, constructing a better community and ecosystem.

On the other hand, Ethereum's most valuable asset is its large developer community. Even though the SBF ecosystem has been striving to incubate new projects, in terms of the scale of the developer community within the ecosystem, Solana's ecosystem is still relatively small. Compared to all other ecosystems competing with Ethereum, the starting point is the same. To stand out, transaction speed and security are just basic requirements. The key is to nurture innovative and revolutionary protocols or platforms. If the Solana ecosystem can successfully attract more top developer teams and leverage the efficiency and innovation of the SBF team, it may have the potential to create a powerful Solana universe.