starckying

Analyst @ph0rt0n recently put together an in-depth report on the State of Solana. The Q2 TLDR? Builders kept building. Here’s some highlights you won’t want to miss: 1. The institutions are coming Stripe demoed their upcoming payments solution on Solana using Phantom, and PayPal issued their PYUSD stablecoin on Solana. PayPal cited token extensions as a key reason for expanding to Solana — one extension, transfer hooks, enables developers to add custom programmable logic to each transfer. 2. PayFi has arrived Helio's Solana Pay Plugin on Shopify saved Solana Labs over $1 million in fees for Chapter2 sales compared to traditional payment methods. Now, it's even more versatile: Users can pay in their preferred token, near-instantly swapping to the merchant's preferred currency via Jupiter. 3. Solana is coming to you (not the other way around) Have a Google account? Congrats, you now have a Solana wallet thanks to TipLink’s Wallet Adapter. No downloads, no seed phrases, no fuss. And if that wasn’t enough, blinks connected Solana to the entire internet, bringing Solana to millions of active X users. Now, you can vote, mint, swap, and donate directly from your feed. Growth is accelerating: Messari reported blinks for over 20 dApps like Helium, Sphere, and Tensor at publication, while Dialect’s registry shows nearly 100 blinks today. If you’re looking to build with blinks, Solana Foundation is offering $400k in grants, while Dialect and Superteam have $1k microgrants available. 4. The ecosystem is working hard on scaling solutions ZK compression, pioneered by Light Protocol and Helius Labs, went live on testnet and drops the state cost for 1M addresses by ~99.9% by storing data via the ledger. MagicBlock unveiled MagicBlock Engine, which enhances SVM customizability and performance without sacrificing composability. It implements ephemeral rollups: temporary runtimes that mirror programs and accounts from mainnet to improve efficiency before settling state back on Solana. The best part? It's all abstracted away from the user. 5. Solana DeFi is happening, led by LST growth Liquid staking rate jumped from 5.2% to 6.4%, with Sanctum's LST market share exploding 3,700% QoQ. Intrigued & want the full picture? Dive into the report👇