The decentralized finance (DeFi) space is quite an exciting sector. Solana, the fifth-largest DeFi network in terms of total value locked (TVL) according to DeFiLlama, has been making headlines amid a series of new developments this week.
Last summer, Solana’s token, SOL, experienced a huge bull run, with its value increasing five times to reach new all-time highs. This surge happened alongside the launch of Sunny, a new DeFi app. By early September, just two weeks after Sunny launched, billions of dollars in crypto had poured into the yield farming platform.
Ian Macalinao inflated Solana TVL
The Sunny DeFi staking platform skyrocketing growth raised questions among some crypto community members, including Saint Eclectic. Saint had questions about who was behind the Sunny protocol, the pseudonymous nature of one of its developers, Surya Khosia, and whether user funds would be safe.
Saint said there was no indication of who Surya was, which made users uncomfortable staking their crypto on the exchange. However, later reports have revealed the identity of Surya as Ian Macalinao, the developer of the Saber stablecoin. Saber is a stablecoin created in the Solana network. Macalinao later built the Sunny aggregator atop the Saber stablecoin.
However, Sunny’s issues were not just with the pseudonymous nature of one of its developers. Ian teamed up with 11 other independent developers to create a massive web of linked DeFi protocols that showed billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies into the Saber ecosystem. This inflated Solana’s TVL as the network rallied to a record high in the last quarter of 2021.
Ian had written a blog post on March 26 that was never published. He wrote this blog post a few days after a massive hack of $52 million on Cashio, one of the protocols that Ian also had secretly helped to create.
Ian says that Saber and Sunny comprised $7.5 billion of the total Solana TVL of $10.5 billion at their peak. He believes this contributed to SOL’s meteoric rise when the token reached a record high of $188.
However, the Solana TVL continued to grow even after Saber started losing value in mid-September 2021, with the metric hitting $15 billion in November last year. At the time, Saber’s TVL had dropped by 64%.
Pumping the token
In the blog post, Ian said they used “friends” and “friends of friends” to anchor everything about the platform. The team promoted the project on social media, shilled their token, and praised the project for its massive growth on Solana.
In the DeFi space, there have been major issues causing a liquidity crunch, especially during the ongoing bear market. However, one of the coins that have shown remarkable resilience during the current market is DeFi Coin (DEFC). DEFC is the native token for the DeFi Swap ecosystem, and it has great utility and verifiable community support that could deliver solid returns for investors.
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