Two things: 2025 is almost here and Solana isn’t going anywhere. You don’t need a crystal ball then to appreciate the value of heeding Solana-focused projects whose star is in the ascendency. What’s good for them next year will likely be good for those who’ve claimed a place within their ecosystem now and positioned themselves accordingly. A rising tide may raise all ships, but some will rise higher, buoyed by the superiority of their product and their distinct value proposition.

While it would be easy to dismiss 2024 as the year when Solana memecoins went exponential, that’s a lazy synopsis that misses the real story. Yes, pump.fun transformed token issuance and spawned a slew of multichain imitators, but what really happened was retail was gifted the memes of production – an eternal ideas generation factory – and in the process discovered that in crypto, code matters but ideas matter more.

In 2025, while Solana’s retail demographic isn’t going anywhere, the network has quietly spent the last 12 months acquiring the tooling and infrastructure for other use cases and user groups to flourish, from RWAs to LSTs and from institutions to pro traders. Next year, these development efforts will coalesce, creating a perfect storm in which Solana puts further distance between itself and the chasing pack on account of its unrivaled network effects. Tl;dr: fade the following projects at your peril.

Magic Eden

Magic Eden is hardly an under-the-radar project: it’s a veritable Solana blue chip. But speaking of blue chips, there’s a particular reason why the NFT marketplace is one to watch going into 2025: the $ME token is coming and anticipation is already building among those who’ve spent the last year collecting diamonds. 

Magic Eden isn’t just dropping a token though: it’s got a whole lot more up its sleeve that could reignite interest in Solana NFTs, while demonstrating that there’s a lot of life and use cases in jpegs yet. With teasers for what lies ahead starting to be dropped, now’s the time to start focusing on what Magic Eden is cooking.

Orbitt

Solana’s fast becoming synonymous with AI, aided by degens turbo-launching AI tokens, but also buoyed by more legitimate projects focused on DePIN. Think GPU, LLM data, and other assets that are integral to AI innovation. Another Solana project that’s moving the needle for AI is Orbitt, a name that should already be familiar to seasoned Solana users on account of its popular tooling such as a volume boosting bot that recently gained a dedicated pump.fun implementation.

But it’s the Orbitt PRO browser extension that showcases Solana’s suitability for AI. It provides valuable trading insights and supports human readable prompts, providing answers to queries ranging from TA interpretation to market sentiment and broader analysis. Just as ChatGPT has become the new Google, AI trading assistants are fast becoming a staple in every DeFi user’s toolkit. For Solana users, Orbitt PRO looks the likeliest to succeed in this fast growing vertical.

Cielo Finance

Cielo has become the preeminent tool for tracking whale wallets and memecoin kings on Solana. It combines a web app featuring an alert stream of transactions with multiple Telegram and Discord bot alerts, making it easier for traders to identify alpha earlier and capitalize on emerging opportunities. The next 1,000x before it’s pulled a 1,000x in other words. While Cielo also tracks EVM chains, Bitcoin, and Sui, it’s become a firm favorite with Solana users.

The ability to view a detailed analysis of Solana wallet profiles, including token balances and realized and unrealized PnL, makes Cielo the go-to tracker for self-styled degens. With Cielo hinting that it’s doubling down on its tooling for the Solana community, expect to see new features added in the months to come that will reinforce its rep as the trench-hunters’ tool of choice. Features such as Multiple Wallet Alerts and Token Alerts are poised to be complemented by new custom alerts that will allow Solana traders to get even more granular and receive faster, more powerful transaction notifications.

Symmetry

One sign of a maturing DeFi ecosystem is the emergence of protocols that build upon existing primitives for lending, borrowing, and staking. Solana’s starting to gain these sorts of secondary DeFi building blocks including Symmetry, a solution for tracking and indexing onchain funds. It forms a powerful portfolio management tool that makes it easier to keep track of DeFi positions and yield opportunities on Solana.

Symmetry’s tools are equally suited to retail as they are to institutional users, but it’s the latter group that’s likely to be the primary beneficiary. Solutions such as Symmetry will be the key to getting more enterprises and pro traders to make it their blockchain of choice while proving that Solana is equally suited to serious business.

Orderly Network

Orderly Network? As in the web3 liquidity layer? Aren’t they on NEAR network? Yes, yes, and sort of. While it’s true that Orderly began life on NEAR, its liquidity layer is chain-agnostic – and it’s coming soon to Solana. Orderly’s already deployed its Solana testnet and when the mainnet drops it’s going to bring a whole lot of liquidity – but the benefits don’t stop there.

Orderly’s white label back-end allows any project to build a DEX with ready-made liquidity and infra on hand. What’s more, the same technology can be used to create perps markets – and it’s here that Orderly could really create a splash on Solana. The arrival of more perps DEXs, fed by deep liquidity and order book matching, will add another vital piece to Solana’s DeFi primitives and cement its status as the epicenter of onchain trading.